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
-
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE
For John Plummer
‘History is a people’s memory.’ Malcolm X
It is VE Day. Though those who still survive –
the eye witnesses – tell angrily of waste
not sacrifice, what should have been a day
of the dead, and the maimed, and the displaced
worldwide is here one of tea parties, sing-songs –
while the toll mounts as if it were the first day
of the Somme. They lied then. They are lying now –
with entitlement’s clipped inflexions,
with the easy rhetoric of privilege,
the sound of the discrete shibboleths
of power and class, the sound their money makes –
lying about the future and the past,
lying about the sick and the dead.
If you are poor, or old, or brown, or black
you will suffer sooner, and die alone.
5 responses to “THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE”
-
The poem strikes a chord. ‘Worldwide’ … yes, I always felt this day in history should include the memory of ALL those who lost their lives, on all sides of the war, soldiers and civilians.
-
Fantastic. Thank you.
-
Sick Man of Europe. We need poetry that expresses the deep and swirling anger many of us feel just now. For me this recalls Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Tell me lies about Vietnam’ https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/13605/auto/0/0/Adrian-Mitchell/TO-WHOM-IT-MAY-CONCERN-TELL-ME-LIES-ABOUT-VIETNAM/en/tile. AM would have applauded your sharply crafted and emotional poem. Yes, we are right to celebrate the sacrifice and endeavours of our caring professions and public services but we do need to howl in rage as well at being continuously lied to by the current ship of fools in charge and its media puppets. Thank you, David.
-
‘The Sick Man of Europe’ is all the more pertinent by its brevity. The final two lines show an uncanny prescience of the events of recent days in the U.S. (and yes, I am aware that the U.S. is not in Europe!), compounded by the criminal negligence of the blind refusal to treat the boils, injustices and malpractices, which have been festering in the UK, but yet to erupt. One of your best poems to date!
-
David,
Thank you for sharing these thoughts and poems. As usual, the incisive mind (a fairly uncommon and hard-to-hear voice amid the constant bellowing these days) gets to the nub of our current and past conditions.
Looking forward to reading the rest when I can sit down with them properly, but in the meantime, the paintbrushes and sculptor’s glue are waving at me from my studio…….
Best wishes,
Jeff
-
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