David Selzer

1046 posts

POETRY

NEVER SUCH INNOCENCE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

Beneath the Edwardian village hall’s
high ceiling, under its oak hammer beams,
beside the Roll of Honour ‘For the Fallen’,
a squad of four year olds does the Conga, plays
The Farmer’s in his Den, Passes the Parcel.
The birthday girl is dressed as Spiderman –
her choice – eschewing Snow White, Rapunzel.

The backcloth of the proscenium stage
is a painting of part of the village
in halcyon shades of early summer –
the elm-lined road from the hall to the church.
There are eighteen names on the Roll – initial,
surname – rankless and ageless in death.

She snuffs out the candles with one breath.
We sing the song, share the cake and play
one last game of Musical Statues.
Everyone wins. Party bags in hand,
goodbyes and thank yous said, children exhausted,
adults relieved, we turn off the lights –
to leave the hall’s long wooden wall clock,
electrified now, to click past each
unrelenting minute.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CARDINALS AND GIANTS

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

As the First Gulf War began, I watched
the Cardinals – in their brewery
sponsored stadium in downtown St Louis –
beat the ‘Frisco Giants. The home team
is named for the scarlet-breasted bird –
the visitors (aka the New York
Gothams before they went west) for chutzpah.
The fixture was part of the USA’s
annual baseball World Series, which,
of course, includes no teams from abroad.

It was a weekday, early evening –
very much a family occasion.
The programme, advertising caps and tee-shirts,
urged us to ‘think of our boys in the Gulf.’
Most of the players had Hispanic names.
In the intervals, the black vendors
climbed the terraced steps. ‘Any of you farmers
want a coke?’ they called and the mostly white
crowd took no offence Missouri being
a state of farms – soya beans and hogs.
Meanwhile, the quadrille of baseball resumed,
its restrained drama accompanied by the theme
from Jaws each time a player made a home run.

As twilight became night, I remembered
the wide river a couple of blocks away –
rising in the hills of Minnesota
and debouching, two thousand miles
and more, through the shining, shifting Delta
into an altogether different gulf –
and I thought of the immense Republic’s
dark, inviolate fields.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

The Armistice was agreed at 5.10 –
in Foch’s personal railway carriage
– among the cigar and brandy fumes.
The Chancellories of Europe knew
thirty minutes later. Big Ben was rung
for the first time in four years and gas lamps
lit in Paris. There was dancing and streamers.

Foch insisted the truce would not take effect
until 11.00 – ostensibly
so the news could be keyed and carried to
each trench and dugout on the Western Front.

Thousands of soldiers were killed that morning.
The last to die – at 10.59 –
was Private Henry Günther from Baltimore,
advancing with comrades in ignorance
through the wild woodland of the Argonne.
The division’s history records: ‘Almost
as he fell, the gunfire died away
and an appalling silence prevailed’.

 

 

 

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POETRY

DRUMMER RIGBY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

..the randomness: it could have been any soldier,
just as found, crossing the road near the barracks
as they hunted in their Vauxhall Tigra;

the futility: his death, their failed martyrdoms;

the iconography: his bearded murderers brandishing
their weapons, issuing statements for the media,
going viral – like his photo in dress uniform;

the kindness: from strangers in that terrible street;

the bandwagoning, the cant,
the high-horseing, the rabble-rousing:
variously from face-bookers, police,
politicians, tabloids, tweeters;

the closure: military funeral, life sentences, memorials;

the grief: a widow, a son, families…

 

 

 

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POETRY

LA PERRUCHE ET LA SIRÈNE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

‘Even if I could have done when I was young what I’m doing now –
and it is what I dreamed of then – I wouldn’t have dared.’  Henri Matisse

 

In his early eighties – a magician
in colours with his (genuinely)
lovely assistant, Lydia – Matisse
creates a canvas, twenty five foot
by eleven, of pinned-on then glued-on
painted paper cut-outs of fronds and fruits,
in many colours, and a profound blue
parakeet and a profound blue mermaid –
seductive, tropical and teeming…
his Oceania revisited,
his northener’s revelation of the south.

There are parakeets – befittingly green –
in the Surrey Hills and mermaids rumoured,
hair flowing fast, far upstream in the Wey.
There are, for certain, by Afon Conwy
sea lavender, thrift and birds foot trefoil
and, in the channels the low tide forms,
curlews and egrets wading and the sea-racked,
black struts of wrecks. Beyond are the purple, mauve,
lilac mountains…my epiphany, my south.

I cut and paste at will and muse with my
‘assistant’ of so many years – lovely,
genuine – on art, youth and aspiration.
Had I known when I became a poet
half a century ago that I could write
this then would I have dared?

 

 

 

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POETRY

IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read1.8K views

Whether from intellectual snobbery or a formally made choice
or wilful ignorance I genuinely cannot remember but,
while my peers strove to be tuned in to the Station of the Stars –
the shifting wave lengths of Luxembourg, and the easy wiles
of Horace Batchelor’s ‘Infra-draws’ and Jimmy Savile’s ‘Guys ‘n Gals’ –
I would listen, on a plastic Bush valve radio in my bedroom,
to the Third Programme and heard, one night, by chance,
in Richard Burtons’s malted baritone, ‘To begin at the beginning:
it is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black…’ and I knew then that the making of words –
the dark, solitary skill – would craft mind and heart, soul and brain.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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