David Selzer

1085 posts

POETRY

SOMEBODY DIED

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.5K views

Once the death had been formally announced,

a member of the commentariat

remarked that the prospect of dying from cold

and hunger in one of the earth’s richest countries

had been rendered ‘insignificant’.

 

The Holocaust Memorial in Hyde Park,

London – one of the city’s eight ‘Royal Parks’ –

was turned into a garden of remembrance

for a rich old woman who died in her bed.

 

The Speaker of the House of Commons,

one of whose predecessors defied a king

and his torturers, declared the funeral

to be “the most important event

the world will ever see” – so putting

the Big Bang, the ability to make fire,

the invention of the wheel, Jesus Christ,

and the end of human life on earth,

for example, into their proper place.

 

***

 

Through medieval mummery that hints at

the divine right of monarchs to rule

and nostalgia for the greed of empire,

politicians and pundits and priests –

who patronisingly tell us what we feel

and what we have felt for seventy years –

have bamboozled this divided nation.

Millions of children go hungry each day

yet we are taxed to fund a lavish,

three-ring circus of inanity,

where few are entitled, and many defer,

where all dissent is cancelled or shamed,

and new divisions appear like sudden

sinkholes in a busy, familiar street.

 

***

 

After a long day of 24/7

coverage of flags, martial music,

and gold brocade, of piped laments, drum beats,

and bells tolling, of mobile phones held aloft,

and superstitious symbolism sanctified,

I remembered her father’s funeral,

when I was nine. We had the day off school.

 

With my maternal grandmother, who was born

six years before Queen Victoria

took the title Empress of India,

I watched the procession live in black and white

on our new tv with its nine inch screen.

There were no daytime tv schedules then,

and very few cameras capable

of outside broadcasts, so the programme

must have been comparatively short,

but the Dead March from Handel’s ‘Saul’, the slow march

of the sailors pulling the gun carriage –

that had borne the dead king’s father’s coffin,

his grandfather’s, and his great grandmother’s –

their deliberate steps, sliding each foot

so slowly before returning it to earth,

like booted dancers in grey greatcoats,

seemed to last almost forever on that

cold February day, when I first learned

what we will do for death.

 

 

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POETRY

VICTORIA TOWER GARDENS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

A ripped Union flag is limp in a tree.

Adjacent to the Houses of Parliament –

a Gothic revival currently crumbling –

these pleasant tree-lined and lawned gardens were once

a sewerage works and riverside jetties.

 

From the embankment the silhouettes moving

to and fro on distant Westminster Bridge

are like figures in a shadow play.

Below on the narrow strand strewn with rubble

is commotion. Two Egyptian geese –

imported as ornamental wild fowl

during the Glorious Revolution –

are urging their brood of four goslings

upstream with warning calls, meanwhile mobbed

by two Grey-legged and two Canada geese.

 

Emily Pankhurst in stone declaims, beckons.

Rodin’s black bronze Burghers of Calais

seem bemused by royal whimsicality.

Close to the site of the planned but disputed

Holocaust Memorial a shape

in a sleeping bag lies near the lawn’s edge.

It moves as a group of language students pass.

Safer to try to sleep rough in loud daylight.

 

Buxton’s abolitionist memorial

is illustrated with Aesop’s fables.

The slave tells us how the boar and the lion

stop fighting, realising that only

the vulture will win.

 

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POETRY

THE TECHNOLOGY OF CONJUNCTIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

On October 15th 1851,

a Wednesday, in Hyde Park, London,

the Great Exhibition – official sponsor

Schweppes – closed. In Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace

of glass and wood and cast iron – incorporating

untouched the park’s trees, and itself perhaps

the chief exhibit – amid the palms and the lamps

and the rest of the world’s ingenuity,

the best of Britain’s design, engineering,

and manufacture had been displayed:

for example, Minton’s majolica

from Stoke, a papier maché piano

from Birmingham. Among the visitors

were Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson

and Lewis Carroll. Enclosing the park’s trees

had a cost. Sparrows flew as freely

as ever, despoiling all stands equally:

from Samuel Colt’s breech-loading revolvers

to Mathew Brady’s daguerreotypes.

Queen Victoria was concerned. ‘Sparrow Hawks,

Ma’am!’ advised the Duke of Wellington,

the veteran of diverse battlefields.

 

In London, three days later, the Saturday,

Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick or The Whale’

was published: that Odyssean tale

of an illimitable zealotry

and self-hatred, and of optimism.

‘I thought I would sail about a little

and see the watery part of the world.

It is a way I have to drive off the spleen…’

 

Is the closeness of significant events

zeitgeist, or merely haphazard happenstance –

human affairs, like leaves, falling where they may?

Making connections (as the Iron Duke did

and Schweppes), like the making of metaphors,

has made us even more successful than rats.

 

Here is a tale of the technology

of conjunctions: somewhere south of the Azores

the only sounds are the lap of the swell

on the clinkers, and the shearwaters mewing,

circling above…the harpoon readied…

the rope’s end lashed tight to the foot of the mast…

the men still, their breaths long, slow, pulses high…

waiting for the leviathan to rise

with its capitalist bounty – the oil

rendered from its blubber – the carcass

becoming noisome jetsam, brief pickings

for frenzies of seabirds…

 

 

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POETRY

THE GREAT STINK

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2K views

At the height of summer, a company

legally entitled to make money

from a natural resource, discharged

raw sewage into the river that flows

through the antique city where I live –

the waters where salmon leaped and spawned;

John Milton’s ‘wizard stream; upon whose

current, Edgar the Peaceable, King

of the English, was rowed upstream by eight

vassal monarchs for his coronation;

and which Ptolemy put on his world map.

 

As yet, you ain’t seen nothing, folks! Three days

after her late Majesty was lowered

into the family vault, a Bill was laid

before Parliament. It has a sunset clause.

After New Year’s Eve in 2023

whole libraries of legislation

will be immolated – regarding,

for example, the pollution of rivers

and sea shores, the preservation of wild life,

the protection of pregnant workers,

the safety of products, and holiday pay.

 

Perhaps when the turds are jostling below

the terrace at the Palace of Westminster,

and the miasma evades the air con,

there will be enough good women and men,

true representatives of the people,

to remove this government of whining,

hollow clowns, led by yet another useful

idiot, these self-indulgent, entitled,

deceitful puppets of straw corrupted by

the dark dosh of the neoliberal

masters of the universe – who are,

even as I type, dividing the moon

and stars between themselves.

 

 

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POETRY

THE NOSE IN QUESTION

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

 For Dr. Evelyn Davies

 

One December morning an unexpected

sun, shining through the partly opened slats

of the bathroom’s white venetian blind, lit

three nascent nodules on my nose’s right side,

budding excrescences not seen before

on this particular olfactory

organ – my neb, my schnozzle, my trwyn.

 

By January they were a tad

roseate. I entered the system

that lifts ‘the shadow from millions of homes’,

as the Welshman said who dreamed it. Named

for an ancient poet, he cured his stammer

reciting in the hills above his home

William Morris’s Chants For Socialists:

‘Come hither lads, and hearken, for a tale

there is to tell, Of the wonderful days

a-coming when all shall be better than well…’

 

I digress. I was prescribed a salve

for acne, and antibiotics; had

photos taken, and X-rays and CT scans;

my overseas travels were noted,

sojourns in Venice, Gascony, Luxor,

KwaZulu, Umbertide, Marrakech;

slices – thin as from the costliest truffle –

were tested for syphilis, and for TB;

finally, a cohort of consultants

in pairs, trios, quartets, for nearly an hour,

touched and scrutinised the three enigmas.

 

The results were negative, the blemishes

removed. Such palpable investments –

of time, technology, expertise, and care –

to ensure an old man’s nose would not be

the death of him!

 

 

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FICTION

‘THE LAST POST’

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments3 min read2.8K views

Given that ‘& Fiction’ has been part of the site’s masthead since its launch in 2009 and nothing has yet been published in this category – and, I can fairly confidently say, never will be now – I feel I owe an explanation of some sort to readers optimistic enough to still venture here after fourteen years of no show.

 

In August 2001, the month after I retired from full time paid employment, I began to write a novel – just because I could rather then because I should. The piece was based on my late mother, and her journeying to and from West Africa, and her experiences in its northern city of Kano, in the early years of World War II. I’m not sure if it ever had a title. It – and any other attempts at prose fiction – were laid aside in favour of screenplays  and stage plays for all of the rest of that decade. Working in both those forms – in which imagery, succinctness and punchlines are key, of course – helped improve my poetry

 

In 2013 the splendidly independent publisher Armadillo Central commissioned me to write a piece of prose. The novella, ‘Only Half A Lie’, returned, in part, to the primary themes of 2001’s unfinished novel, namely identity, bigotry,  absurdity and love. Though complete, the vicissitudes of fortune prevented it from being published. Since then I have planned to post it on the site.

 

Recently, in preparing the work for publication, I realised it needed significant editing, and, in carrying that out, I became aware of a major implausibility in the plot. Sometimes the house of cards gets blown away,  sometimes it’s rained on,  sometimes it just collapses from within!

 

Unlike the other literary forms I’ve been fortunate enough to employ, prose fiction has no boundaries. Even the freest of verse has to end its lines somewhere, and the rules governing screenplays, for example, are as rigorous as those for any type of sonnet. But prose fiction – and I emphasis prose – has no pre-set limits, and so to write it well you have to be properly grown up, like Penelope Fitzgerald or William Trevor. And if you’re super grown up – like Margaret Attwood or Thomas Hardy – you get to write good poems as well.

 

There have been two other attempts at prose fiction since ‘Only Half A Lie’ – both also about identity, bigotry,  absurdity and love – one set in Venice and one here in Hoole, but neither of them breathed independently. It seems appropriate that the one complete novella should have had the title it had. There’s a Yiddish saying: a halbe emmes ist a ganst ligner – a half truth is a whole lie.

 

I’m a thrifty soul so, no doubt, as I continue to address those same themes, the characters, scenes, situations, and plots currently buried in a hard drive will appear, in due course, in the poems. Perhaps poetry is the supreme fiction.

 

 

 

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