David Selzer

1046 posts

POETRY

A DAY OUT

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read1.9K views

From one of the high rise budget hotels

in Portimao we picked up a group

of six challenged men and their two minders.

(Portugal, our tour guide told us later,

was enabling those – institutionalised

since childhood for learning difficulties –

to take vacations, with supervision,

from the drab, echoing, noisome halls).

Two were remarkable: a gaunt fellow

bent permanently double, always moving,

keeping close to the other, a joker

with moustached Arabic looks and frightened eyes.

 

We crossed the Arade – more reed bed now

than river – and entered ancient Silves;

visited the cathedral – an erstwhile mosque –

and the Moorish castle. The jester

talked almost without breathing, the bent chap

by his side. We drove through regimented

plantations of pine, acacia,

eucalyptus, climbing towards the spa town

of Caldas de Monchique – cool beneath its oaks

and umbrella pines. The stooped lad

ran quickly from shade to shade. His mate

spoke rapidly to the halcyon air.

 

We ascended Mount Foia – with its shop,

café, and air force radar station.

Westwards we could see Cape St Vincent,

the Atlantic – south imagine Morocco.

The two young men were sitting on a step,

out of the wind, smoking roll ups, watching

a family – mum and dad, two boys –

flying a crimson kite.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE SEA AND THE STARS

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

The owl we heard last night hoots near the road

and a fox barks deep among the oak trees.

Though it is moonless and the sea a sliver

of a different dark, light pollution

from the small resort to the east

means we must find the westernmost wall

to lean against and view the stars tonight.

We see them trembling and marvel, wordless,

so many more than we ever remember.

We forget they are always above us.

 

‘What is the sky for?’ I asked my mother

and she said, ‘To hold the stars,’ and I wondered.

‘What colour is the sea?’ I asked my mother

and she said, ‘The colours of the sky.’

‘What is the sea for?’ I asked my mother

and she said, ‘To give us life,’ and I knew.

 

A discarded bottle returns sculpted,

an iron spar rusted, shapeless, their journeys

unchartable but so much remains –

so many bones unburied, so many

stories unfinished – for there is no dark

like the deep of the oceans. Corals

that we will never touch, blind creatures

we will never see teem down, down in the

cold, indigo ravines.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ENCHANTMENT

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

“Do you know, Grandpa, this book has seventeen

chapters, and I’m on chapter fifteen,

‘The Forbidden Forest’?” “I didn’t,” I say,

“That’s excellent!” and this seven year old,

who has mastered the use of apostrophes,

curls up, like the proverbial worm

on the sofa, and continues to read

‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’.

I am re-reading, in English,  ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’.

 

In the garden, using extended loppers,

Grandma is cutting choice blooms from a rose

we have had some thirty years, a rambler

as high as our upper floor and worthy

of Sleeping Beauty’s entranced gardens.

 

I look up to watch my grandchild read. My pride

tempts me to ask fatuous questions –

“Are you enjoying it? What’s it about?” –

then speak of alchemy. Humility

prevails. I hear Grandma in the kitchen.

She is hammering the ends of the stems.

The deep scent of the roses, from wherever

she has placed the vase, enters the lounge

like a wisp of sweet smoke.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE LAST OF BRITAIN

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

The when, where, why of the last of Britain

is not easy to pinpoint exactly.

 

Perhaps it was Dudley Moore, the comic actor

and skilful musician, drunk, approaching

Princess Margaret at some exclusive do

and slurring, “Good evening, your royal highness.

I suppose a blow job is out of the question?”

 

Or the woman herself choosing not to be buried

with her peers, but cremated in Slough.

 

Possibly it was the Queen and her consort,

walking like storks, among the tributes to

The People’s Princess – or the tributes per se.

 

Probably it was the vicar’s daughter,

the mistress of orotund cliché and

patronising retort, inviting herself

to Florence to tell the world the Continent

was cut off yet again – in that city

of beauty and feuds, where Galileo

was denounced, and Dante encountered Beatrice.

 

***

 

Ford Madox Brown’s ‘The Last of England’ depicts

an emigrant couple – youngish, well dressed –

on a windswept deck beneath Dover’s cliffs.

The man is stricken by their anxious future –

the woman is trusting or stoical.

Her right hand holds his, her left clutches

that of a child hidden under her cloak.

Behind them on the stormy deck there is

roistering, bravado.

 

 

 

Note: The poem was first published on Facebook on 4.10.17.

 

 

 

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POETRY

OCCAM’S RAZOR…

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

…a maxim named for a Franciscan friar,

William of Ockham, from the Surrey village –

and from London, Oxford, Avignon,

Munich – Pope’s enemy, Emperor’s friend,

dying just as the Black Death was scourging.

 

It is a metaphor, not logic chopping –

best summarised, perhaps, as ‘less is more’,

‘don’t over-egg the pudding’, even

‘fine words butter no parsnips’. He was

the radical philosopher of his age,

a nominalist – words are words, ideas

ideas, no more, no less. Plato, relinquo!

 

Avoiding an A3 rush hour traffic jam,

I drove through Ockham one rainy night,

watching the headlights follow the bendy turns

of the old field system and glisten

on the hedgerows and the oaks, and I thought

of the little boy, the brightest scholar

in the priest’s small school, being taken

for Mother Church’s future to London

in a jolting ox cart, his Latin

a passport through Europe.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MONKS AND TOURISTS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

Sheltering from a summer shower

beneath the portico of the Tunsgate Arch,

Guildford, I looked down the steep High Street

towards the bridge over the River Wey

and saw three bespectacled Buddhist Monks

emerge from Dolland & Aitchison and,

lifting their saffron robes, run to Jigsaw.

 

Enjoying my pan fried sea bass and Guinness

in The Faulkner, Hoole, and watching the rain

trickle down the Walker Street Co-op’s facade,

my view was suddenly blocked by a coach

from which a party of middle aged

Japanese tourists descended and,

brollies hoisted, ran over the road

to The Bromfield Arms with its vending machines,

flat screen tvs and menu of ‘Pub Classics’.

 

When I was a young man I assumed wonders

had to be travelled to: Maldon, Marseilles,

Moose Jaw, Machu Picchu – but now I know

you only have to stand and wait or sit.

 

 

 

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