POETRY

POETRY

GLIMPSING GODS

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read337 views

That evening in the Poseidon Lounge of our

5 star clifftop hotel, spa & resort –

with the tideless Mediterranean

lapping soundlessly, timelessly out of sight –

there was something about the in-house

entertainment team’s announcing

the week’s festivities, some gaucheness perhaps,

an enforced glee, which reminded me

of school camp on the Lleyn Peninsula

the August I was nine, and we ate

Wagon Wheels round the fire, and told jokes

about Hitler, the war being recent.

 

The first day I woke anxious at dawn, and peed

in my sleeping bag. I told no one, and slept

in damp bedding for however many days

and nights we were there in the ex-army

ridge tent, vast, dark, noisome. Even in sun I

shivered and drifted as my fever rose –

and nobody knew. On Porth Neigwl beach,

or Hell’s Mouth, where Atlantic rollers roar

I dreamt –  beyond my insouciant fellows’

paleness in the shimmering and pulsing waves –

I saw a glistening, slate grey dolphin

rise and fall, effortlessly, endlessly.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

MISTAKEN IDENTITIES

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments2 min read393 views

‘The middle classes, in England as elsewhere, under democracy are morally dependent upon the aristocracy, and the aristocracy are morally in fear of the middle class which is gradually absorbing and destroying them. The lower classes still exist; but perhaps they will not exist for long. In the music-hall comedians they find the artistic expression and dignity of their own lives…With the dwindling of the music-hall…the lower classes will tend to drop into the same state of amorphous protoplasm as the bourgeoisie. T.S. Eliot, MARIE LLOYD, 1923

 

When I was a teenager in the ’50s

BBCTV, as if to prove

vaudeville were dead, would feature, at peak hours

music-hall acts in ‘variety shows’.

One such was G.H. Elliot, the self-styled

‘Chocolate Coloured Coon’. That a white, light tenor

and tap dancer should put on black-face, or rather,

brown-face, hence the ‘chocolate’, seemed no more strange

to my adolescence than Nuclear Tests,

Suez, Hungary, and the slowly emerging

truths about the Holocaust. In school,

about this time, we read The Journey

of the Magi – which prompted, sotto voce

at the back of the class, the cod carol,

‘We three kings of Warrington are, two

in a bottle, one in a jar’ –  and I thought,

possibly with youth’s wishful thinking,

the poet and the song-and-dance man were one.

I marvelled how the same person found time

to be both a ‘variety star’

and a ‘serious poet’, never mind

acquire the necessary know-how.

 

The poet has a plaque in Poets’ Corner,

Westminster Abbey. His ashes are buried

in East Coker, Somerset, from where

his ancestors moved to pillage and rape

the New World – and his anti-Semitism

has been duly contextualised.

The artiste’s headstone has been removed

from his grave in the parish churchyard

in Rottingdean – on England’s south coast

near Brighton, once popular with show-biz types –

pro tem, because of its ‘offensive language’,

which a stone mason will eradicate.

White, Christian entitlement, with its

patrician, imperial longings,

refreshing its lipstick…

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

JAZZ IN ROOM M

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read296 views

i.m. Anthony (Tony) Barrell

 

‘Jazz, unlike a bucket of nails, is full of paradoxes’.

Norman Granz, sleeve note to ELLA AND LOUIS

 

During term time he had an understanding

with the prefect in charge of the tuck shop,

which was on the ground floor of the decaying

annex. His record player was kept

under the counter until each Tuesday

after school, when it would be brought up a floor

to Room M. How he had persuaded

whoever he had had to persuade

to allow his fellow scholars to listen

to jazz at all never mind unsupervised

he never said, and we never asked.

He was Le Grand Meaulnes in that grammar school

of scholarship boys – founded, as part

of the reformation, by Henry VIII,

or, rather, the strategic Thomas Cromwell,

seeing the need for serried offices of clerks.

The annex was a neglected Georgian house

clamped to the substantial sandstone gateway

of the abbey Thomas and Henry dissolved.

 

The LPs he played were his – mostly big band,

Benny Goodman to Stan Kenton but sometimes

the quintet of the Hot Club of France. He was

the pedagogue par excellence – charming,

intense, generous, a good listener

in every way. We went there to learn.

He was very much our guru,

our rabbi – with a sharp sense of humour –

and at the start of a creative lifetime,

making important things happen for others,

in print, on the radio and TV.

The Head Master, a reverend, would have

considered him ‘anti’ – which translates as

‘willing and able to enable

others to see behind the curtain’.

 

One Tuesday he played us the album

‘Drum Battle’: Ella Fitzgerald vocals,

Oscar Petersen piano, percussion

Gene Krupa versus Buddy Rich – bandleaders,

erstwhile sidemen with Goodman and Dorsey –

a Jewish American and a Polish American,

on snare, bass, tom-tom, hi-hat, cymbals,

four beats to the bar in Carnegie Hall.

 

In that shabby room, its long sash windows

filled with views unchanged for centuries

of an English provincial city,

we were jazzmen chatting between solos –

about Lionel Hampton’s purple LP,

the Duke boycotting venues in the Deep South,

Django Reinhart evading the Nazis.

 

Note: Tony Barrell – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Barrell_(broadcaster)

 

 

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POETRY

THE CYBER DEAD

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read272 views

‘Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door,’ a busker

began to sing near to the ice cream kiosk,

just after I had left the public toilet,

its adamantine urinals made

in Burnley. I walked beneath the lime trees,

along the embankment. The brown river

swirled in spate, high with rains from the remnants

of Atlantic storms breaking on shorn

and distant mountains. I thought of those dead friends –

their social media accounts intestate –

forever alive, and orbiting

eternally in cyber space, so close

yet still and always forlornly ‘Knock-knock-

knockin’ on Heaven’s door’.

 

 

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POETRY

AS IF

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read328 views

On the end wall of the erstwhile refectory

of the Convent of Santa Maria

delle Grazie, Milan – which is merely

a stone’s row from where a mob of women

mutilated Benito Mussolini

and hung his corpse from a lamp post – hangs

Leonardo Da Vinci’s THE LAST SUPPER.

 

A tourist once asked a guide three questions:

‘These are Jewish men?’ ‘This is the Passover?’

‘So where are the matzos?’

 

 

 

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POETRY

BACK INTO PARADISE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read401 views

‘They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes’.

PSALM 63, VERSE 10, KING JAMES BIBLE

 

Walking through Borough Market one Friday night,

past bagged litter, cacophonous wine bars,

themed eateries, and food waste in gutters,

I saw, trotting across Cathedral Street,

seemingly following the arrow

to the main entrance to Southwark Cathedral,

a fox – heading for its hidden earth perhaps,

on hallowed ground near Shakespeare’s grave.

 

As I made for Borough High Street – a place

of perpetual emergency sirens,

an aimless thoroughfare of dreadful nights,

and my lodgings down a yard lined with fag ends –

I thought of how the diocesan fox

had looked my way as if acknowledging

a fellowship in cunning and survival.

I assumed there was a skulk of foxes

in the graveyard, part of London’s militia

of ten thousand foxy scavengers.

 

I remembered King Lear – who, of course, did not know

how it all would end – repenting the harsh, proud

foolishness of his age, reconciling

with Cordelia, relishing their being

together in prison, finding love at last.

Only fire from heaven, he said, would part them,

and banish them ‘like foxes’. I remembered

Samson, enflaming the tails of three hundred

foxes, and sending them into the fields

of the Philistines to scorch their corn,

their olive groves, their vineyards. And I wondered then

what sort of fervent fire there would have to be

to hound us all – the biblical strongman,

the mad king, the urban fox, and me –

back into paradise.

 

Note: Now re-published in the Winter 2026 edition of Exterminating Angel.

 

 

 

 

 

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