David Selzer

1046 posts

POETRY

GUILT

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read1.8K views

All the best places were forbidden, disused,
decrepit, far from net curtains, aunts,
mother spoiling a lost fatherless boy.
Best was the brickworks. We thrust, like commandos
sharp with twigs and fear, through undergrowth
into the yards. Blackberries burst, purpling
in private summers. Once, I hid in reeds.
A sundew glistened. A horsefly hovered.
I heard my companions calling, calling…
My mother met us raging, loving before
friends who had fathers. Shame prickled my face
the blackberries had stained.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE GATES OF MERCY

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

‘…Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib’d alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind…’
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

 

When I was a pre-pubescent boy, I read
The Eagle – having graduated from
the seditious slapstick of The Beano
and The Dandy – a comic with Christian
values, though the masthead did not say so.
Its heroes were square-jawed with no moral flaws:
Dan Dare, Storm Nelson, PC 49,
Harris Tweed and Tommy Walls – ice cream
and woven cloth, such product placements!

The centre pages showed cutaways of
torpedo boats and aircraft carriers.
The prevalent villain was the Mekon
from Venus, with his hydrocephalic head,
riding some technological wizardry.
But worthiness would always triumph.
The lives of St Patrick and St Paul
featured, if I remember – citizens
of Rome and brothers in Christ triumphant.

I thought of those evolutionary charts,
beloved of late Victorians, showing
homo sapiens – upright, striding forth –
ascending left to right from ambling apes,
thought progress inevitable
when, adolescent and idealistic,
a young man and political, I believed
we could build Jerusalem, make it
as clean as Dan Dare’s London, make it
out of kindness and justice and children
ascending but we are slamming fast – even
unto the third and fourth generation –
the gates of mercy.

 

Note: The poem has been featured in ‘INTO AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE WITH DAN DARE’ – http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/into-uncertain-future-with-dan-dare.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=linkedin

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

EUREKA!

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

A realisation as sudden as
Archimedes’ leaping from his bath,
the moment when – in the pleasure gardens
of Wisley, with its giant rhubarb leaves,
its gaping carp, its hissing swans, its wild
playground – going for a well earned modest slab
of chocolate cake and a babychino
enhanced with spoonsful of Grandma’s latte,
pointing, she called out, “That says ‘Coffee Shop’!
I can read!”

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

OVER THE RAINBOW

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

For Elizabeth Salter

Fitting that we should see an amateur
‘Wizard of Oz’ in the Gladstone Theatre –
opened by William Ewart himself,
whose mission was ‘to pacify Ireland’ –
in Port Sunlight, that model, industrial
village and home of the soap that made
Tommy ‘the CLEANEST fighter in the world’.

Some of the audience have come in costume –
there are Munchkins, a Tin Man, two Lions
and a Dorothy with a toy Toto.
How rapt we all are with the music,
the plot, the invention! This is a
latter-day ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ with good tunes
and witty words – where God aka the Wizard
is a self-effacing huckster, a kindly
fortune teller from Omaha, Nebraska,
three clicks away from the Emerald City.

 

 

 

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POETRY

FIFTEEN MINUTES

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.3K views

More than four decades ago, I taught English
in a boy’s grammar, waiting for it to go
comprehensive. I can think of three
notable alumni: a Labour PM,
whose only school magazine piece was
‘Ephemera’; the lover and killer
of a fêted, controversial playwright;
and a cult film director (see below).

The classrooms were built round a courtyard –
as if the architect had worked to some
Mediterranean model. Mine
was opposite the staffroom. One lunchtime,
I was marking at my desk and looked up
to see the said director, furtive,
at the staffroom door. I continued marking.

I heard shouting and looked up again to see
a colleague pounding on the door. (There was
a gap between the lintel and the door
into which three large screws had been driven).

There was huffing and tutting and enquiries –
low profile to deter imitation –
by the Deputy, an overweight caner.
‘You were at your desk. What did you see?’
‘I was intent on my work,’ I said, grinning.
‘This is serious!’ ‘Indeed it is,’ I said,
laughing. Courtesy of Mrs. Thatcher,
the school never went comprehensive. I left.

It never occurred to me to betray
such a consummate piece of performance art,
such an exquisite act of irony –
the masters trapped in their privilege,
imprisoned in their ignorance – but rather
held the knowledge close like a password
to my identity. I disclose it now
I am almost certain who I am.

 

 

 

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POETRY

BAMBURGH

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.6K views

Driving to Scotland, via the North East,
to celebrate six months in a new job,
we stayed overnight in Durham to see
the romanesque, sandstone cathedral
with its relics of Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede,
denizens of Northumbria and its isles.
Next day, I saw a sign for Bamburgh –
somewhere I had visited in boyhood –
and suggested a detour off the A1.
We never made it over the border.

We drove down lanes lined with oak, ash, hawthorn,
and saw Bamburgh Castle against the sea,
resplendent on its volcanic outcrop
in a northern August afternoon sun,
centuries and epochs set in cut stone –
Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans –
knowing here was somewhere we should stop.

We could see the castle from our hotel room.
We walked St Aidan’s wide, sandy beach
to Beadnell’s gentle harbour and took a boat
from Seahouses to the Farne Islands
to see the colony of grey seals
basking on the bronze seaweed. A bumble bee
kept pace with the boat all of the way,
like us a wondering, wandering stranger.

We visited Lindisfarne Castle
and Holy Island, where Asian women,
in saris, on a coach trip sheltered
from the sea haar. We thought of the saints
and the Armstrongs, castle owners now
once arms kings, and Grace Darling, heroine
of Bamburgh and Wordsworth’s ‘A maiden
gentle…pious…pure, modest and yet so brave…’

It was good to go somewhere new – to
re-make love in the splendidly antwacky
hotel with Craster kippers large as plates;
on the windy beach; among the rustling dunes;
against the cold, cold sea.

 

 

 

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