David Selzer

1085 posts

OTHER PEOPLE'S FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS: ‘The Point of Vanishing Stability’ John Huddart

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments3 min read3K views

I set out believing I was a reader, a collector of books. It was marvellous that the children I taught could write engagingly – and it would certainly stand them in good stead when they became readers too. Years into teaching, struggling with the burdens of so many unread books, I was plucked from the classroom and deposited in the National Writing Project, because I had been snared by word processing.

The Project had several key principles – one was that teachers of writing should be writers too. How can you expect them to, if you don’t? So I started to write, to record observations, to explore poems as models, and to enjoy technical formality. And in those days, teachers often met and worked with professional writers – today, they simply have to work with the National Curriculum.

And then there is David. Always wise, and always a writer, he has been a continual example and inspiration. If you are reading this, you are one of David’s fans as well, and look forward to his monthly collection.

I too have a poetry website, and publish what I write on it. The url is www.jahuddart.com, and I email my friends with regular updates, though in not so timely a fashion as David.

The Point of Vanishing Stability I wrote after a week’s sailing in very stormy weather off the west coast of Scotland, which explains the context.

Some poems rush into the world, almost fully formed, and find their connections to the wider sinews of life, almost instinctively. This is one of them – would they were all like that!

 

The Point of Vanishing Stability

In a yacht, the point of vanishing stability

is reached when the vessel decides

it has had enough of gales and tumult,

and will overturn. In the boat we are on,

this is a measurable angle, defined

by calculation and testing. We are pleased

to learn it is 120°.

Summoning up our mathematical imagination

we place the mast well below the surface,

with our boat springing back to save us

as we tumble about our ends.

It is a phrase that seizes. Passing

straight from the workshop manual

to the page of possibility. As we charge

the waves, and crash through with

jovial insouciance, the world and

its endless chaos breaks upon the

decks to tumble past in salty streams.

 

And so we trust to all designers

that the keel will hold beneath, that

the mounting pressure on the sails

will spill from the tops like so much

laughter. And so with all the lubberly

uproar from our safety-conscious lands,

with bitter crowds converging

on the monuments they would disown,

with grave ministers of state who

battle with the tide of numbers

competing for our panic or our grief.

 

May the bow split water still,

may whosoever did the sums

and placed us in this sea have got it right.

Through edgy fears and sacrifice

we stand fast to the wheel, and

still keep on tacking home, past tipping

points that howl but never come.

 

 

 

 

©John Huddart 2021

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

IN PRAISE OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB

David Selzer By David Selzer10 Comments1 min read3K views

For Steve Crewe

 

A journalist friend of mine in Jakarta

sends me articles online, which, in turn,

I share on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter,

making me seem, after Francis Bacon –

who was purported to have read every

book ever written – the most erudite man

in Europe: an article, for example,

explaining that Plato was right when he claimed

the world is made of cubes, or another

about cougars in Yellowstone Park

occasionally dying from the plague.

 

The internet brings to my door swizzle sticks,

and tea-lights, the Selected Poems

of Norman Rosten, and the Complete Writings

of Phyllis Wheatley; provides unfettered

knowledge or illusions, the schooling that suits,

that sticks; takes instant messages of protest

to my MP, and the Prime Minister;

bonds me to an ubiquitous tribe

of iconoclasts; shows me not only

that the Emperor has no clothes but also

there is no Emperor nor ever was.

 

As I write I think of who might read this

published on my website – in sunlight

on their phones, beneath a lamp, rain drubbing

on window panes; at what latitudes

and longitudes, on what continents,

in what tropics and what temperate zones;

actual and virtual friends, and strangers;

a humbling fellowship.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

HOME TIME

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

The ditches along Duttons Lane have been full

much of March – because February-fill-dyke

was mostly dry, almost Spring for days.

The glinting water is dark as black tea,

brown as bitter beer. Along Acres Lane

the hawthorn hedgerows are beginning to green.

 

We park as near the school as we can.

The leafy lane is overflowing with song.

As we walk through the security gates

to join the others waiting – a social mix,

and mainly white – a westerly wind

brings the roars of lions from the zoo nearby.

The daily Beluga flies overhead

with parts from Toulouse for Airbus wings

to be built at Broughton. The handcart

we may go to Hell in will be well designed!

 

But she appears, our quotidian

messiah, the unexpected grandchild

to redeem us in our eld, our dotage.

How she inundates our doting hearts,

makes us merry with love!

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE BROKEN BRANCH

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.2K views

Where the primary school and the houses end

are hawthorn hedges and occasional oaks

on either side of the lane. From the school gates

the leafless trees are an arching, tangled

fretwork – closer each twig is proud, discrete,

vital, sentient. A sudden gust of wind,

or a lightning blow, in one oak tree’s

early growth snapped off a branch, and left an arm

with a claw like a beak. Shut behind the gates

the gradground children have no chance at all

to imagine the stub of a branch a bird,

note the old birds’ nests in the hedgerows,

acorns crushed beneath occasional tyres,

and, whole, nestling in the wintry verges –

or count the first green leaves.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A CHORUS OF ZITHERS

David Selzer By David Selzer11 Comments2 min read2.8K views

The English education system is made

to inculcate compliance – through failure –

with the nation’s stereotyping.

It remains still a work in progress.

For nearly seventy years most learners,

unless they passed an exam at eleven,

would stay in the same council school from four

to twelve, then thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

When I was seven I attended one

of the last such schools, at the end of our road.

There were two entrances with GIRLS & INFANTS

and BOYS carved in the sandstone lintels,

and so two yards – one for spears, one for distaffs!

Whatever the weather the boys would line up.

Once through the doors we would walk single file

through the cloakroom, zig-zagging past each row

of numbered pegs, each row monitored

by a pupil in his final year, who might

already be fifteen, and even shave.

 

That year the movie, The Third Man, was released,

and the theme music played on a zither

became popular on the radio,

and part of the film common knowledge:

Holly Martens stumbling after Harry Lime,

his erstwhile friend, through a dripping tunnel

of shadows and echoes, revolver in hand.

 

One sleety winter day I remember that,

as we were trudging through the cloakroom,

hanging up wet coats – those of us who had them –

one of the monitors began to hum

the zither tune, and the others took it up.

The impromptu choirmaster turned off the lights,

and, smiling in the gloom, not unkindly said,

‘We’re blind in the sewers!’

 

 

 

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POETRY

ECO-WARRIOR

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.2K views

for Elise Oliver

 

If, when I grow even older than I am

now and were, perhaps, too old to make poems,

I would become a sower of wildflowers.

 

Each year, I would begin with the Narrows,

an ancient path where our street ends –

where children are walked to school, commuters

walk to work, and revellers sway home

caterwauling. Each spring and summer

in the unkempt verges there would be the sight

and scent of Bird’s-foot Trefoil, Kidney Vetch,

Viper’s Bugloss, Common Agrimony.

 

Next I would target driveways that had been

front gardens. Under cover of masking

a cough or saluting an imagined friend

I would scatter Yarrow, Borage, Cornflower,

Common Goatsbeard, Purple Loosestrife, Herb Robert.

 

There is a section of our local park,

between a laurel hedge and cast iron railings,

a glade of Stygian dimness, filled

with modest monuments to the dead.

I would broadcast Field Forget-me-not,

Meadowsweet, Welsh Poppy, Cowslip, Corn Cockle.

 

To plan for when I could no longer shuffle

about the neighbourhood I would recruit

a volunteer band of almost antiques.

I would train them in our back garden

in techniques of broadcasting and dissembling,

and receive their reports, in due course,

on our colonisers’ colours, perfumes,

the roll-call of their names.

 

 

 

 

 

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