Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
South Stack, Ynys Môn, ©Sylvia Selzer 2009
Of course, by the time it’s my turn at the ’scope
the bugger’s turned its back. ‘It is a puffin,’
reassures the RSPB girl – and,
since she’s pretty and young, I believe
that what I see is not one of the teeming,
noisy, noisome, nesting guillemots,
razorbills or gulls. A hat trick: ageism,
sexism, anthropomorphism – plus
being churlish as a bear rather than
valiant as a lion.
Behind the lintel of the Lion Gate,
swallows had built their nest. Two Mirage jets,
burning Nato dollars, buzzed the valley.
A sweatstained, overweight American
squatted in the shade of the ashlar ramparts,
fanning himself with a bush hat. “Hey, which
pile of stones is this?” A veteran’s pension
kept him in exile. His mom and dad
had once stood arm-in-arm with that eager,
cropped marine recruit, who was altogether now
someone else. Thanksgiving and each birthday,
he would call collect.
Before Churchill took the railings, evacuees
from Liverpool were lined up by the park
one September Sunday afternoon.
Local residents queued to take their pick.
Innocent days! My widowed Granny
and two spinster aunties – ex-Scousers
(though Toxteth Park not Scottie Road),
the sisters Great War collateral damage –
lined up to do their duty. They couldn’t cope.
The one they chose used the ‘f word’
and wet the bed. They gave her back
– and mentioned her,
Chester, View from a Balloon, John McGahey, 1855
i
Rome’s legionnaires quarried its sandstone cliffs
and Ptolemy put the Dee on the map.
William the Conqueror, in winter,
force-marched his army over the Pennines
to reach the river and waste the town – the last
to submit. For eighteen years, Prince Gryfyd
ap Cynan, shut in the keep, heard only
the river’s voice, dyfrdwy, dyfrdwy.
Parliament’s forces sent fire rafts downstream
to purge besieged citizens.
All summer a spider, mottled like a cheetah,
managed a web by our kitchen door.
Tap the net
and it would do its eight shoe scuttle.
It went finally:
but the engineering survived –
intricate, pliable, foolproof –
through seasons of drizzle and bluster.
On an April day, a pallid sun
backlit trapped raindrops,
shimmering prisms.
We paused on the step, delighted.
The power of things to strive to be themselves
is absolutely self-regarding,
A sudden heavy shower of summer rain
slows the early evening motorway
to a blood red blur of brake lights.
In my mirror, I see two cars collide,
career across the lanes – and others stop,
receding out of sight into the downpour…
I am thirteen and a half and tall for my age –
the year of Hungary and Suez;
am sitting on the red leather back seat
of an almost straight-from-the-showroom
Morris Minor (in the inexorable green),
Above me, on the slates, pigeons are cooing –
and some already billing, though winter
has many weeks to run. Like a shadow play,
sunlight silhouettes them on the wall
the study window faces. From the desk,
I have looked up, over three decades,
to tease, from bricks, reluctant words of love.
Before the allotments were sold off,
by the railway, there were pigeon lofts.
At dawn, out of a livid sky, birds
would home with only guessed at effort,
A dirty night in the Menai Straits…
a paddle steamer on a sudden sandbank –
pounding itself, pounding itself, pounding…
seas silencing the hullabaloo.
For the last time, the lifeboat pulls for the shore.
Two lovers, roped to the mast, drown their joy.
All turned to chalk on the dark sea bed.
Far, far above was the muffled cry
of gulls, the cormorant’s swift shadow.
Ram, The Aberdeen Bestiary
i
A swan, standing, preening itself obliviously
in the nearside lane of the overpass,
diverts the chance commuters into
storytellers for the day.
ii
One morning, perched on a bird table, a kestrel
was tearing a head.
A pheasant, late in the afternoon, whirred from the terrace
and over the privet.
A SORT OF KADDISH
A SORT OF KADDISH
THE MOLD CAPE
A SORT OF KADDISH
FROM A BALCONY