David Selzer

1046 posts

POETRY

NATURAL SELECTION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

Sitting on the bench on our patio, sipping

our peppermint teas one August morning,

we saw five buzzards leisurely circling

the church spire, a quintet of raptors,

four of a kind – and a joker for crows

and jackdaws to mob. But what is the prey

in this suburb for so many to survive?

 

The Romans built a road from Deva

to the salt pans on the plain over this heath

and its brook and through its hollows. Heather

and gorse, under the Normans, became

a habitat for outlaws – until

the overgrown road was used for droving beasts

in their hundreds, thousands to market.

Prisoners of the ‘45 were tried

where the brook turns north. When the railways came,

developers built villas and terraces –

between the wars, semis. Bedsits and druggies

arrived. But we are gentrified now –

sharing with the Brown Rat our good fortune.

 

The first buzzard I ever saw was perched

in an oak in the Ogwen Pass. Gamekeepers’

poison, myxie rabbits and pesticides

had all but extinguished them from the lowlands.

The gamekeepers went to war, 5 per cent

of the rabbits survived, pesticides

were regulated and these predators

thrived, needing less sustenance per day

than kestrels or sparrow hawks or kites –

being ambushers and opportunists.

So, here’s to the buzzards and the rats –

and us, lords of them all!

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE HEREDITARY PRINCIPLE

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read1.9K views

Hugh d’Avranches, one of the Conqueror’s henchmen,

with him at Hastings, got the Saxon earldom

of Chester and the palatine of Cheshire,

with its forests of deer and boar, as reward.

His nicknames were ‘Lupus’ and ‘Gros Veneur’

because he ravened the Welsh like a wolf

and he was a hunter and a glutton.

 

His descendant, Gerald Grosvenor, His Grace,

the late, sad 6th Duke of Westminster – holder

of twenty eight appointments, decorations,

medals, orders and titles, many bestowed

by the Queen; landlord of much of London’s

Belgravia and Mayfair, where dwell

Arab despots, Russian oligarchs

and celebrities from showbiz and fashion;

his motto being ‘Virtus Non Stemma’,

‘Virtue Not Pedigree’ – had riches

greater than the combined wealth of six

million of his poorest, fellow subjects.

And we are all, everyone of us, subjects

of Her Majesty. What a great leveller

our constitutional monarchy is!

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE MINER’S WELFARE INSTITUTE, LLAY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.7K views

Taking a wrong turn, as per usual,

out of Wrexham, I found myself driving

to Llay* up that gradual gradient,

looking for signposts to places I knew

to set me right but reached the colliery houses –

built in the ’20s with indoor toilet,

bath and the electric at nine pence a week –

on First Avenue, Second Avenue

and so forth to the Ninth as if the owner

could not be arsed to find proper, local  names.

Llay Main was the deepest pit in Britain.

The seams were worked out by ’66

so the village missed the Scargill/Thatcher show.

 

I saw the sign for Rossett and knew my way –

but then, on the brow of the rise, saw

the white neo-Edwardian Baroque

of the Miner’s Welfare Institute –

the large lettered name picked out in gold

like a movie palace or a music hall –

built with dues paid by each miner (hence

the apostrophe) for books and billiards,

cricket and pantomimes, talks and meetings.

 

I slowed, moved by its pristine survival:

a community venue for quizzes

and sports, for carnivals and weddings.

As I drove down towards Rossett, I could see

the distant refineries at Stanlow

on the far edge of the Cheshire Plain

and thought how we are close to forgetting

our history, of acting as if coal

leapt ready hewn from the earth or turned itself

into gas to make the world too warm.

 

Once, within a radius of fifteen miles

of Llay, among the hills, meadows, rivers,

woods, were two steel works and sixty pits.

It was lethal work in the stuffy dark

under the crushing heat of rock and earth,

uncared for and unregarded work.

 

In Gresford pit, fewer than two miles from Llay

two hundred and sixty six men and boys

were killed in one explosion – all but eleven

entombed in the abandoned galleries.

Among the thwarted rescuers were teams

of miners from Llay.  The words ‘whited

sepulchre’ come unbidden – hiding

exploitation, pain, loss.

 

 

*Llay rhymes with ‘die’ and ‘lie’.

 

 

 

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POETRY

GOLDEN

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.8K views

As luck would have it, we were married this day

exactly half a century ago.

We holiday with our small family

to avoid the inevitable party

and announce our golden wedding to friends

via Facebook – and receive some humbling

encouragements that speak not simply

of being there like pebbles as the tide

ebbs and flows but of inspiration.

 

We chose to honeymoon by Bantry Bay.

Ireland spoke of mystery and romance –

to us ignorant of its privations.

As we drove through the town that August Sunday,

the sun lowering over the Atlantic,

some church festival was finishing.

A wedding guest had hidden confetti

in our suitcase so, as you unpacked our clothes

for the first time, gaudy paper disks fluttered

over the bed beneath The Sacred Heart.

Our week was ended with upset stomachs.

We had had lunch – potatoes, carrots, bacon –

in a dark panelled restaurant in Cork,

surrounded by unsmiling nuns and priests.

We were infidels in Calvary land.

 

On the return ferry, to save money,

we spent the night in armchairs in the bar.

Before midnight a gale blew up that rolled us

forty five degrees starboard to port and back.

We could see ships nearby in Liverpool Bay

bucking as in a cartoon of a tempest.

Behind the bar’s locked grills, glasses and bottles

shattered. Bench seats along the saloon’s sides

broke free and two lines of strangers grinning

with fear briefly curtsied to each other.

 

‘Strange to be there, beginning something new,’

I wrote that autumn. ‘Strange to go there,

hoping for what might come.’ The narrow fields

and lanes seemed untouched since the Great Hunger –

yet the dry stone walls were festooned for miles

with wild fuchsia and honeysuckle. Now

it seems as if we had known that we would learn there

how to weather sickness, storms – and bask in joy.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A GOOSE IN THE BAMBOO

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read1.9K views

Catching a charter flight from Manchester,

the family eases through security

but I am detained – there are traces

of explosive in my backpack: poems

on the hard drive? The scanner is at fault.

 

At Nikos Kazantzakis Heraklion –

the only airport named for a writer –

one of our cases arrives broken

on the single baggage carousel

and one of the gent’s toilets has backed up

but ‘Zorba’s Dance’ is playing somewhere,

the sea beyond the runways could be almost

‘wine-dark’ and the oven heat warms old bones.

 

Our hotel room overlooks a valley

charmed by Cretan sun in early June, washed

in El Greco shades and citrus colours,

with the usual eclectic small holdings

among the scrub – olives, vines, tomatoes

and bananas; hens and cock scratching;

three nanny goats clanking; two black dogs caged;

a stand of bamboo. On our balcony

with our granddaughter we play ‘I spy’

– but we cannot see the goose that honks

periodically in the bamboo

and sets the watch dogs barking.

 

There are activities throughout the day

round the pool for children of all ages.

It is water polo time and chaps

from England, Poland, Germany play

boisterously but amicably.

The French study their screens, a quartet

of middle aged Israeli men is aloof,

two British Asian families remain

circumspect. We came last time in early May –

the Great Patriotic Holiday

enjoyed by affluent ethnic Russians.

Our granddaughter swims endlessly like a shrimp

in the cosmopolitan waters.

 

At Heraklion the security

is seasonal, part-timers attired

in G4S finery complete

with white lanyards so there is role play –

queues are long and scrutiny relaxed.

At Manchester, in the EU passport queue

we shuffle along, without music,

with passengers from Islamabad

to the ID scanner – and chuckle,

thinking of all the closet racists

who would swallow their tongues in such a queue.

At the scanner, a witty, local lass

in a hijab helps us. O brave new world

that has such! ARRIVALS is threatening

with armed police, loud with distant honking.

A car has been parked in the wrong place.

We have flown from attic comedy to low

farce, goosed in the process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

LENIN AND THE BOURBAKI PANORAMA

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.7K views

Lenin, to leaven his exile in Zurich,

would sometimes weekend in Luzern and,

after kalberwurst with onions and gravy

at the Wilden-Mann on Bahnhofstrasse,

would always visit the Panorama

in the Löwenplatz – or so it is said.

 

Panoramas were popular before

the illusion of photography,

still or moving, became reality.

They were cycloramas painted in oil,

typically fifteen metres high, one hundred

metres in circumference – often

with a three dimensional aspect:

in this case, for example, an empty

railway wagon – Huit chevaux, Quarantes hommes.

 

General Bourbaki’s beaten L’Armée de L’Est

in Bismarck’s Franco-Prussian War

sought asylum with the nascent Red Cross

of the now united cantons. In deep snow

eighty seven thousand men, twelve thousand

horses, crossed the border that January.

 

An escapee from a school trip to the town

in the year of Hungary and Suez,

I wandered in by chance. The custodian

that day knew no English. My schoolboy French

struggled with his German-accent. But

I still remember the images

of the aftermath of some great battle

my history lessons had not mentioned.

 

Imagine if Lenin had learned from this –

the stumbling soldiers; the dead horses; the piles

of discarded, expensive rifles;

the woman with her basket waiting to help

whoever it might be lying in the cold.

 

He certainly learned from the railways.

Disguised as a worker, he returned

to Russia via the Finland Station.

But maybe he also learned from William Tell –

marksman and anti-imperialist –

or, rather, the apple.

 

 

 

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