Welcome to David Selzer
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
Latest Post / Update
-
COURAGE
In the stretch from here to where the river bends
around the meadows, there have been drownings –
crowded pleasure boats upturned, youths,
desperate with raucous bravado,
jumping from the suspension foot bridge.
The river, which is a whorl and tension
of conflicting, muddied undertows,
seems linear today, almost emollient.
A children’s cancer charity has fastenedawareness-raising memento mori
to the wrought iron railings of the bridge.
The cards and photographs – obscuring
the occasional lovers’ padlock – are tied
together, and to the rails, carefully,
almost gaily, with golden ribbon.
The charity promotes research. The bridge’s
wooden walkway registers each human step,
shifts with each tread, beating like a slow heart.
One card begins, ‘If love could have saved you…’
We dare not imagine such loss, such
unendurable humility, such
self-effacing courage.
3 responses to “COURAGE”
-
It is not often that we are privileged to share river walks with dear friends, but thanks for sharing these with us. A visual treat, with old father Dee stripped of her name, elemental and historic! And gender free!
-
I am reminded of the tragic drowning of Jonathan Price in the Dee over sixty years ago. A golden boy, whom everyone loved: home on vacation from his first term at Magdalen College, Oxford, he took out a sculling boat which overturned in the winter swell.
I have thought of him from time to time over the past years, and wondered what might have been; and how painful his death must have been for his parents and his brother, Nicholas.
-
Thank you for your lovely remembrance, David. Jonathan is mentioned, though not by name, in another poem in this collection: THE EMBRACE OF NOTHING.
-
-
Search by Tag
9/11 A.E. Housman America Anglesey anti-semitism Atlantic Atlantic Slave Trade Auschwitz Beaumaris British Cape Town cathedral Celts charity Cheshire Chester childhood Churchill Civil War comrades cormorant death Dee dee estuary Dublin England English Europe Ezra Pound Fossils fox French Gaza gazebo gibbet God Great War Greenland gulls heart Hegel Hitler Iraq Ireland Irish sea irony. Israel Jerusalem Jews landscape Liverpool Liverpool Bay Llandudno London love Manhattan May Menai Straits Mersey miracle Missouri Moscow Napoleon North Wales Ovid paradise Paris Parkgate Plato pre-pubescent Putin racist river river Dee robin roma Romans Rome Russia skull South Africa Soweto Stalin swifts T.S. Eliot teacher Telford travellers Trump USA Venice Victorian Vienna W.B. Yeats Wales Wellington Welsh winter Wirral Ynys Mon
Leave a Reply