David Selzer

1046 posts

POETRY

A FLY (AND INFINITY)

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

Whilst I am at my morning exercises,

the limited dumbbell, the selected

Pilates, observing, through the French window,

the shimmering, ornamental grasses –

that obscure the water feature – and the odd

finch and dunnock feasting on the birch

and the lawn, a large, black, raucous fly

hits one of the panes, once, twice, thrice then stops,

becomes silent. We are all learners, most of the time.

It – in a long life I have never learned

how to sex a fly – walks with care, slowly,

methodically, systematically

across the pane, looking for an end to

such transparent nonsense.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE LANE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

The motorway cuts through it. It was always

a proper Cheshire country lane with

ditches and hedgerows of may and oak

but it remained an unpaved track subject

to the weathers. Travellers or Roma –

though ‘Gypsies’ or ‘Irish Tinkers’ we called them

then – with grass for their hirsute ponies,

their caravans obscured by the hedges

and their shy kids safe from the odd car,

would camp there. We would try to explore,

to find where it led, hoping for some mansion

occupied by GIs with their comics

and gum. But, each time we tried, one of the men,

the same one always – wiry, dark haired, sharp eyed –

would send us packing with a raised fist

and a curse. One summer, near dusk, we crept

as close as we dared. The man was seated,

on a stool, playing a guitar. Somewhere,

out of sight, a woman was singing.

 

We got a telling off, home after dark,

and my spinster aunt sang, unbidden,

‘I’m away wi’ the raggle taggle gypsy-o!’

 

I drive by what remains of the lane often

and always, out of the corner of my eye,

look – as if there were something to see

other than grass and weeds.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE PLAYMAKER…

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

For Mike Francis

 

…realising the hopes, dreams, nightmares, visions,

of other artists;

 

transporting us from a silent, empty black box to

Kwazulu, Hastings, the Marches, Belfast, the Balkans,

and endless rooms and streets in Ellesmere Port;

 

transporting us to a roundhouse, a pigeon loft, a ferry,

a seashore, a desert, a hill fort, a lonely farm, a cave;

 

truly gifted – with more than a touch of genius;

 

rigorously creative – solving problems with

always elegant, quality solutions;

 

mastering a repertoire of skills –

carpentry, metal-work, information technology;

 

mastering a range of technologies –

wood, metal, plastic, sound, light;

 

understanding, appreciating, exploiting

the grace and strength of materials;

 

a modest, unassuming, self-deprecating perfectionist.

 

 

 

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POETRY

POVERTY, POVERTY KNOCK

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

Up a steep lane banked with a flint wall

are the remains of a workhouse. A heritage

lottery grant has preserved the section

for men in its pristine austerity.

 

In return for a wash, clothes boiled, a bowl

of gruel, a night’s sleep, the following day

from first light they would grind stones – working

a cast iron, giant-size egg slicer, like

a destructive loom. After midday,

and no food, they would tramp, like their Poor Law

forebears, to the next parish, the next workhouse.

 

My grandmother, despite the Welfare State,

her widow’s pension and her three daughters’

pensionable, public service ‘jobs for life’,

invoked the spectre of the workhouse.

And the spectre haunts us still. Poverty is,

at best, a venial sin purged through

working for nowt or as near as nowt –

or a mortal sin, punishable

by eternity in bed & breakfast

after bed & breakfast from town to town

with no table to eat at, nowhere to play…

 

All luxuries were forbidden, so,

at the bottom of the lane, the lads

would stow their smokes in gaps between the flints.

As they set off on their next tramp, I would

like to think they’d all light up and joke

how they had fooled the master yet again

– and curse a bit and laugh a lot. But, perhaps,

they had been brought too low.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE LAST CLOCK

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

As a wave breaking then breaking then breaking

and, finally, falling, dispersing on the sands,

the red azalea bloomed then the crimson

camellia, the purple magnolia

and the white weeping cherry – its blossoms,

the silk folds of its petals, April’s winds

and showers were scattering like snowflakes.

 

After, the unfolding flesh of the leaves,

contoured like malachite, sturdy as stone

seemingly, seduces. How can this surprise

more and more each year, as if unknown, unseen?

A grasping of life before the last clock

– tickety tock, tickety tock – strikes?

 

 

 

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POETRY

SUCH PEOPLE TO LOVE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

As I leaf through the three albums you have made –

mostly of your photographs plus some

of my poems – one book for each of her years –

I realise we are ready for the fourth

and how every day of every

year has been as full as a lifetime.

 

You have only caught her best side – quite right

too – as she grows up into her self: none

of those heartbreaking, fearful tantrums where

her world becomes chaotic, senseless with

her sense of injustice in a world of giants.

 

I almost write ‘the miracle of her growth’,

though godless – ‘wonder’ will do just as well.

And I wonder what she will be at fourteen,

thirty four, fifty four…and what her world

will be like. Ah, immortal longings –

to try to conjure the future as if

I might be there! Who would have thought when I was

four that hearts would be transplanted, glaciers

melt – and I would have such people to love?

 

 

 

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