David Selzer

1085 posts

POETRY

FROM AGINCOURT TO MARIUPOL

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.2K views

Much of the history of modern Europe,

from Agincourt to Mariupol,

seems to comprise ignorant, arrogant

purportedly Christian armies – some ragged,

most well financed – advancing, retreating,

slaughtering innocents, telling lies,

with brief respites for rearmament,

and victory’s parades and revenges.

 

Even respectable men who should know

better, scholars and poets, politicos

and hacks, pretend to be soldiers, to ‘Hear

the drums of morning play. Hark the empty

highways crying “Who’ll beyond the hills away?”‘

They broadcast the recruiting sergeant’s drum roll –

for volunteers to step up and play

one of humankind’s most ancient games,

border disputes and the massing of troops.

 

The Soviets created the famine

in Ukraine, as the British did in Ireland,

to chasten the natives, remove them.

Such holodomors need not just a Peel,

a Russell, snug in 10 Downing Street,

or a Stalin, secure in the Kremlin –

choosing which omelettes are on the menu,

which eggs, and how many, should be broken –

but hierarchies of aiders and abetters,

dutiful enablers of iniquity.

 

 

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POETRY

THE LITHOGRAPH

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

The pandemic was daily news last year,

often from someone’s kitchen or study.

Once, behind a British virologist’s

talking head, was a black and white lithograph

from the same series of a hundred

as one we have: ‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’,

ours bought in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Market –

the May Putin was first crowned – from the artist’s

son, the father an emigré in New York.

 

Uncle Vanya and the Three Sisters

might stray into the etching’s romantic

melancholy, its stillness, its almost

ominous quietude, its imminent

sense of loss – as if the hawser taut

across the quarry in ‘The Cherry Orchard’

were about to snap at any moment.

Through a tangled thicket of leafless birch trees

a stretch of water gleams: beyond, a low rise

with a pale fence, and a wooden dacha small

against an alabaster sky.

 

 

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POETRY

THE MAKING OF HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2.1K views

Though both of his parents were Party members

they had him secretly baptised in case

Stalin died. They often spoke about

the Doroga Zhizni, the Road of Life,

the ice routes built across Lake Ladoga

each winter, under bombardment, to help

lift the siege of Leningrad. He spent

much of his childhood chasing after rats

in the bombed-out ruins of Peter the Great’s

once imperial city. Perhaps he was

playing at being Ivan the Terrible

routing the Tatars from Crimea.

 

He appeared, in middle age, to have discovered

the narcissist within. Now he is elderly,

possibly addicted to anabolic

steroids, allegedly the owner

of gold-plated toilets in a palace

on the Black Sea, perhaps the mafia boss

of his old cronies from St Petersburg,

apparatchiks in expropriation

and manipulation. Certainly he appears

to believe that what a bunch of Varangians

aka Vikings got up to on a stretch

of the River Dnipro more than a

millennium ago must determine

what happens now.

 

 

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POETRY

EXCEPTIONALISM

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

The Japanese Imperial Army’s

mistreatment of POWs

during World War II was a war crime.

The killing of Japanese civilians

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

by the United States Army Air Force

was a geopolitical strategy.

 

Daily, on the tv screen, out of the sky

suffering comes: dust, flames, detritus,

outcries – and the living burdened, fleeing…

 

…Myanmar, Baghdad, Grozny, the fall

of Paris – long lines of people south

on the roads through the fields of the Beauce,

trying to scatter at the siren sound

of a Stuka bomber beginning its dive…

 

…as armies retreat or advance, casual

atrocities, private massacres

randomly uncovered, indicted,

transmogrified if necessary

by statecraft’s convenient amnesia…

 

I used to believe that if there had been

24/7 Live Updates from

No-Man’s-Land on the Western Front

or the VC tunnels in the forests

of Vietnam those conflicts would not have

lasted a week – but now I am not so sure

for someone, somewhere is gaining glory,

telling lies, making money out of this

the simple immorality of war.

 

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POETRY

WHEN THE TIMES DARKEN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

After the Anschluss and Sudetenland,

before the invasion of Poland,

Bertholt Brecht, in exile from the Third Reich

in a thatched cottage on a Danish island,

posed a question in a short poem –

‘When the dark times arrive will there still be songs?’

As poets tend to do Brecht answered himself.

‘Yes, there will even then be singing – about

the dark times that have come’.

 

After the arms manufacturer’s profits

have returned to normal, and democratic

politicians’ have devised new distractions

for their electorates, and cheerleaders

who would send other people’s sons and daughters

to war have found new enthusiasms,

and the defeated have been punished,

the pacifists admonished, the victors

exonerated, and much of Africa

and the so-called Middle East has been unpeopled

by famine, and the world continues

to be consumed by fire, drought and flood,

will there still be singing?

 

 

Note: For a translation rather than an imitation of Brecht’s ‘In den finsteren Zeiten…’ see Edwin Morgan’s: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/when-times-darken/.

 

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BETWEEN RIVERS

BETWEEN RIVERS: INTRODUCTION – ALAN HORNE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read6.3K views

It’s a great pleasure to introduce and act as guest editor for this section of David’s site.

One day, David and I found that we had both written poems which referred obliquely to the Gresford disaster, a coalmine explosion, in a village near Wrexham in north-east Wales, which killed 266 people in 1934. We discovered a shared interest in this part of Wales, which centres on the catchment of the River Alun. No surprise there: the area is a popular destination for days out from Chester, where David has lived for most of his life, and from the Wirral, where I spent my childhood.

We noticed that, as far as we could see, there is little attention paid to this locality in literature, despite the existence of some remarkable cultural institutions such as the Theatr Clwyd in Mold and Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden. Yet it has an emblematic position in British history: a contested border between England and Wales revised as recently as 1974, and a linguistic frontier, with hills, rivers and fertile lowlands, minerals, heavy industry, ports, and big winners and losers in the post-industrial economy. Others may know of glorious memorializations of this area: we needed to find them.

We envisaged a project which would highlight literary and cultural artifacts relating to the area, and generate new ones. We widened our horizons a little, to include the area delineated by three rivers – the Alun, the Dee and the Gowy – to include north-east Wales and west Cheshire as well as the Flintshire and Wirral coasts of the Dee Estuary. BETWEEN RIVERS was born.

This wider area includes the city of Chester, plentifully represented in art and history, though our intention is not to focus on the city but on its extensive hinterland. We hope to be disciplined rather then pedantic about this geographical orientation.

As this is an English-language site, we do not claim to represent the wealth of Welsh-speaking culture in the area. But as William Blake says: Without Contraries is no progression. So we try to contribute a little to fruitful interaction across the language boundary.

BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly feature. Some we write ourselves. Some we discover, and we hope that readers of David’s site will point us to others. Over time we have featured a broad range of content, including paintings, fiction, history, photographs, poetry and review, and we aim to incorporate other cultural forms as we go along. We try to give equal weight and value to the past and the present, with both new and established work. As ever on David’s website, your comments are an integral part of the process, but for BETWEEN RIVERS we would also be keen to receive recommendations of literature, history and cultural objects which might be included.

In sum, we hope to instruct ourselves while drawing the attention of others to a fascinating region. I hope you enjoy this section. Welcome to BETWEEN RIVERS.

 

©Alan Horne 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

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