David Selzer

1046 posts

POETRY

BY ANY OTHER NAME

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

 For Sandra Lewis

 

We were unsure where to put the Christmas Rose,

aka hellebore niger, you brought us

this December gone. We chose, pro tem, the room

where I write, with its two long windows.

The light the north facing one lets in

is unambiguous. The other accepts

occasional sun from late mornings

to early evenings. I write in a corner

by a wall of books. With its much travelled

piano, its bodhrán missing a drumstick,

a clutch of recorders, a violin case

under the chaise longue, we call this space,

not wholly ironically, ‘The Music Room’.

Its harmonics sound through my poems.

 

This so-called rose – an ancient cure for madness,

a guard against evil, no more connected

particularly to Yuletide other than

it flowers as the year turns through darkness –

is, I learn, a distant buttercup. Here

its subtle beauty thrives.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

BREAK AN EGG!

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

I am reminded of Professor Wallofski’s

Omelette, Prince of Demark, and the rotten egg

the curate ate, watching this particular

‘peasant rogue…tear a passion to tatters’

as if each word were merely a bagatelle

on a stage the size of a tennis court.

‘Oh, what a noble mind…’ But, yoking apart,

who would wander those chill corridors,

discouraged by the guttering torches

in their sconces, where duty and hatred,

love and negligence throng in the smoky

shadows only words discombobulate –

or be unsettled by the Baltic surging

at the cliffs where ambition leaps ‘Even,’

as the lad himself said, ‘for an eggshell!’

 

 

Note: The poem was first posted on the site in December 2015.

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

NO LESS LIQUID

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

‘Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind…’
CATS II, A.S.J. Tessimond

 

With your lithe delight, at the refuge for strays

and rejects, you and she chose each other

immediately. She had a white tuft

at her throat but otherwise was truly

sable; with Egyptian eyes – emerald,

unblinking, discerning; a sycophantic

charmer; an aloof dowager; a great

mouser, night or day, bearing carcasses

as reward for those that worshipped her.

 

She slipped away like water – though, seemingly,

she had become so street-wise sidling

through whatever wilderness she came from.

With such easy pickings in expansive

suburban gardens so close to fields

maybe she became insouciant.

Her feline subtlety was outmatched

by brute, human force – a car broke her neck.

 

***

 

On the large touch screen in the library,

while we are waiting for Grandma to join us,

you write, using its CAD facility,

many things, including your age – seven

and three quarters – and draw a picture

of your cat, a heart, then write your name

and hers. You turn to smile at me. They were wrong

the writers of Genesis. There is death

as well as birth in Paradise. When we lose

innocence and know the terror in the dark

or the light, we learn to mourn and grieve –

and forget to remember and smile.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

THE ABATTOIR AT MAZINGARBE

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

The push for Aubers Ridge had been postponed

because of rain. But the Saturday

was dry and sunny. Going up the line

in the early evening, the Munsters

stood easy at the shrine to Our Lady.

‘…in remissionem peccatorum…’

By noon, next day, nearly half were dead,

caught on the German wire Haig’s ill equipped

artillery had, once more, failed to cut.

 

In Mazingarbe, an industrial town

ten miles south, the British commandeered

the abattoir. The first to be shot at dawn

was a Munster regular from Cork.

‘…in nomine Patris…’

 

 

 

Note: An earlier version of the piece has been posted twice before on the site – in November 2012 and August 2014.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

STAPLETON COTTON 1ST VISCOUNT COMBERMERE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read3.9K views

Stapleton Cotton 1st Viscount Combermere’s

equestrian statue, surrounded now

by traffic, would grace any capital.

For more than a hundred and fifty years

set before Chester Castle he rides south

towards Thomas Harrison’s Grosvenor Bridge

– once the longest single-span arch in the world –

opened by Princess Victoria.

The Viscount – soldier, politician,

diplomat – holds his feathered bicorne

at his side as if just removed in salute.

 

Though Combermere’s seat (once an abbey, now

a wedding venue) was a day’s ride away,

and Earl Grosvenor was the Roman city’s

capo di tutti capi, Chester’s

mercantile citizenry raised the cash

to have the statue designed and made

by Queen Victoria’s favourite sculptor,

Carlo Marochetti, whose Richard

Coeur De Lion holds his sword aloft

outside the Houses of Parliament.

 

However, like the Earl and the Viscount,

the merchants were knights of the chequered square,

and Stapleton Cotton – Valenciennes,

Salamanca, Bharatpur, c-in-c

West Indies then India – helped make

the British Empire safe for their dividends.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

THE FORK IN THE ROAD

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.8K views

They would never know that the narrow lanes –

one right, up the thickly wooded hill,

the other, following the valley’s curve,

quickly out of sight – led to the same place,

and that the few houses there were shuttered.

 

They had stopped – the diesel puttering,

the brown exhaust fouling the summer air –

in front of the triangle of long grass,

with a glass fronted shrine at its centre,

that marked the fork in the road. The officer

searched the landscape with binoculars,

quartering the maize fields on either side

then looking for movement among the trees

on the hill. They waited. The engine puttered.

They both thought, though neither could say, that

this was not where they wanted to be.

 

Drawing his revolver, the officer got out

slowly to examine the shrine. The driver

revved the engine slightly. The grass triangle

had been uncut for months. A wild flower bloomed –

and heavy rain or some animal

had flattened a narrow path to the shrine.

The fields of maize chafed in the warm soft wind.

 

The shrine was typical of the country:

a rectangular wooden box painted green

fixed to a rusted cast iron pedestal –

with something behind the small red glass door

(usually a dried flower and a bone).

The officer reached to open the door but heard

the engine revved – and returned to the cab,

placing his revolver into its holster.

 

The diesel puttered. The driver gripped the wheel.

Suddenly, round the curve of the valley road,

a white horse galloped towards them and past,

its reins whipping the dust. The officer

drew his gun. The brown exhaust fouled the air.

And the shrine exploded.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments