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David Selzer is a writer of poetry, prose fiction, screenplays and stage plays. He embraces digital platforms to share his work of more than fifty years… READ MORE
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WISHES
For Evelyn, b.13.1.10
Born to good music by strong women,
Ella’s ‘isle of joy’, Nina’s ‘it’s a new dawn’ –
how you nestle in your parents’ untrammelled
love, how you suck with unrelenting hunger!
Born into a world of rubble, with children
buried alive, a world of chicanery
and hatreds – you have entered a difficult,
place, little Evie, somewhere remarkable,
full of tears and amazing kindnesses!
Born into a world of snow, a fox’s
nocturnal tracks in the white garden
of the tall, Victorian villa, a Blackcap
at the bird feeder, a Redwing sheltering
in the laurel and, away on the Downs,
boys and girls, freed from school, tobogganing
over the fossils and flints on the steep shore
of a Palaeolithic sea – how you squirm
with hunger, how you bask in so much love!
Three wishes then for you, little bird:
may you be lucky, may you be gracious,
may you always have someone to love!
4 responses to “WISHES”
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Just gorgeous.
Not very ‘critical’ that, is it?
How about ‘transporting’ or ‘crammed with truth’? Yes, that’s right.
Hard truths bristle through our world – but at moments – like the birth of a child – it’s still an amazing, incredible world to be in.-
Thank you. ‘Gorgeous’ is fine! A much underused word – like ‘transporting’. And, yes, this is an extraordinary place.
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I love this – such beautiful wishes for little Evie, and what we all wish for our children. I know I do for my two wonderful “babies” of 16 and 22!!
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Like very much the way you have placed your wee gem in her correct period setting. Poem puts me in mind of Philip Larkin’s ‘May you be ordinary’, which is no bad thing. But rather than ‘Wishes’ I think I would have called it ‘Nestling’ (and then some years later written ‘Fledgling’ as a companion piece).
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