David Selzer

1046 posts

POETRY

MORAL TALES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.9K views

Before the fell doctor took his axe to it,

there was a line from Paddington via

Ruabon up the valley to Lake Bala

and so to Barmouth on Cardigan Bay.

What is left is Llangollen to Carrog,

a heritage line run by volunteers.

 

They have Thomas the Tank Engine days.

The smoke boxes are covered by plastic

faces – Edward, Gordon, Thomas himself.

We go en famille and our grandchild,

predictably, is enchanted but not

surprised. Her universe swarms with magic.

As we eat at a picnic table

on the platform, the Fat Controller

raises his hat to us. She stares enthralled.

 

How very Church of England these tales are,

though not without humour or pathos!

It is the old church – the Tory party at prayer,

and the old party – gentry and tenants.

The useful trains trundle to the beat of

Hymns Ancient & Modern – ‘The rich man

in his castle, The poor man at his gate’.

 

Our engine is Gordon, Britannia Class.

He pumps out gouts of steam as the gradient

rises steeply from Llangollen to Berwyn;

passes the Eisteddfod grounds and crosses

the Dee, where bathers wave from a shallow,

sandy inlet and the little one waves back;

climbs through the Berwyn Tunnel; pauses

at Glyndyfrdwy – where Owain Glyndwr

proclaimed himself Prince of Wales; and so –

past a meadow with sheep and a horse

by a river bend, through sparse woods of ash

and oak – to Carrog and a puppet show.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

COINCIDENCE…

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read1.8K views

the storyteller’s trapdoor: ‘And it so

happened…’ But it does sometimes. Aristotle

called them ‘accidents’ – and here’s a pile-up!

 

It is a Thursday night – and bell ringing

practice at the parish church we can see

from the long window on the half landing.

Our house was here years before the church

or the houses behind us or in our street.

The Shoulder of Mutton Field was bought

at auction and the first built was ours

more than a hundred and sixty years ago.

From the window, uninterrupted,

there would have been Cheshire countryside.

The first tenants were the Caldecotts,

one of whose sons was the illustrator

Randolph Caldecott. I attended

the same school he had done. The first grown up

poem my mother read me was Cowper’s

‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’.

How I loved the drumming of the metre,

the slam-dunk of the rhymes and Caldecott’s

gaudy, storytelling illustrations!

 

A city infant, he was certain

the hedgerows, pasture, dew ponds of his boyhood

had inspired his art. He died, not quite forty,

in an unseasonably damp and cold

St Augustine, Florida, where, of course,

he had gone for his health. The cause of death

was the heart disease he had developed as

a child. I imagine him descend,

say on some early summer morning,

the wide, sunlit stairs, one hand carefully

on the banister, the other gripping

a pencil and sketch book; edge through the back door

kept ajar for the air, cross, as quickly

as he is able, the swept, cobbled yard,

lift the latch of the door in the high wall

and step through into the brightness of the fields…

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

UBUNTU

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.1K views

The play had finished. There were a hundred

or so children of Orange Farm township –

a large, informal city of mostly

shacks, few paved roads, limited clean water.

These seven, eight, nine year olds lucky enough

to be in school had shrieked with fearful delight,

laughed with wonder, their imaginations

transforming the double classroom’s bare,

austere walls into Dumisani’s

journey through English, Sotho, Venda

Xhosa, Zulu so he could play his drum.

 

To thank us, their teacher asked them to sing

a hymn, ‘Waiting at the Gate’. I expected,

as at home, unsteady voices reaching

for monophony but no, here, each child

sang the harmonious line that suited

her or him, an infinite polyphony.

 

I can see them still – serious, confident,

as if what really mattered to them then

was the eternity beyond heaven’s gate

the words long for – and hear them now, their

culture’s joyful, heartbreaking harmony,

that commonwealth of sound.

 

 

 

Note: UBUNTU has been posted on June 16th – Youth Day in South Africa.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SIX DEGREES: THE MAY BLITZ, LIVERPOOL 1941

David Selzer By David Selzer9 Comments2 min read3.2K views

For Lesley Johnson

 

Obviously they were after the docklands –

Liverpool, Wallasey, Birkenhead –

with a week long of raids but many bombs,

as usual, missed their targets entirely,

shrapnelling then burning streets – commercial

and residential – either side of the river,

upstream and down. The photos of acres

of devastation in Liverpool’s

downtown city centre prefigured Dresden.

 

There is a watercolour in the Walker

by Peter Shepheard – ‘Liverpool from Oxton,

4 a.m., 4th May 1941’ –

which depicts, from the leafy Victorian

suburb across the river, the worst raid

of the week. You focus instantly on

six clouds of smoke, billowing in a strong

south easterly, lit lobster pink by the miles

of fires below and silhouetting

a dozen barrage balloons. The glare

shines on the slate roofs of Birkenhead.

Also, in silhouette, are the ‘Three Graces’,

untouched, across the river at the Pier Head,

buildings that were the city’s symbols of wealth,

power – Port of Liverpool, Cunard, Liver.

Dawn is beginning to lighten the sky

to the east, which is free of smoke and flames.

 

We receive a postcard of the picture

from a friend. She tells us she is fully

recovered from her operation

and is ready for lunch – and reminds us that,

when she was two in Shorefields, New Ferry

(a small town on the southern Mersey shore),

that night hot shrapnel pierced the roof of her home,

landing on her pillow, setting it alight.

Her father saved her. And I suddenly

remember, like an epiphany,

that that weekend, my father, en route

to Nigeria, was in Liverpool

staying at The Adelphi and joined the line

of buckets to try to douse the fire

at Lewis’s department store opposite.

They failed, of course. All that remained were

the walls. The rooftop menagerie,

of songbirds, small monkeys and the odd lizard,

had fallen, with the broken, blackened glass,

in amongst the rubble.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SWIFTS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.8K views

This morning apple blossom, scattered by

the softest of winds, showered me like

confetti and, by chance, I looked up

into a deep, deep cobalt sky and there

they were – one, two then a third and fourth –

arriving perennially at this time

here each May. Monogamous, returning

to the same nests until they die, each

generation nesting in the empty nests –

each generation now, as it returns yearly

from the tropics, finding more and more nests

gone as buildings are renovated

and new ones built sealed as airless boxes.

Aerobatic harbingers of summer

then autumn, once flocking our suburban sky,

are becoming presagers of dearth.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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