POETRY

POETRY

WAITING FOR LEVIATHAN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read164 views

‘True’ and ‘false’ are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither ‘truth’ nor ‘falsehood’.  LEVIATHAN, Thomas Hobbes

 

What better place to wait than on a balcony

facing east! Below are a narrow road,

a short promenade and two tidal inlets

divided by a jut of rock of ages –

jagged, steadfast! And what better day!

 

No sooner has the Haredi family –

who are renting the house on the headland –

finished bathing: females in one inlet

and males in the other – than a car arrives

with three male Jehovah’s Witnesses,

who sit on a bench overlooking the sea,

having set up a folding notice board,

and talk to each other, sometimes laughing.

 

And, not very long after they have gone,

a large, extended family of Muslims,

some of the women wearing hijabs, appears.

They are led by a man in late middle age.

He takes the whole party of twenty or so

away from the beach and up a track

and out of sight onto pastureland –

then he leads them back down, and this time

onto the shore where he has them pose,

with some difficulty, for a selfie.

 

Later, there is only the tides’ drift; the rise

and fall of seaweed on the jutting rocks;

a pair of cormorants flying westwards;

the dusk dimming the light on the sea;

the night falling slowly, uneasily.

Perhaps Leviathan is no more.

He was still alive in the Book of Job

where ‘Out of his nostrils goeth smoke,’

but in the Book of Isaiah God

‘with his sore…great…strong sword shall punish

Leviathan the piercing serpent…

he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea’.

Perhaps God is dead, and the beast came ashore

in the darkness while I was sleeping –

and, in my dreams, I mistook as lightning

its napalm breath, as thunder its bunker bombs,

as a flock of gulls rising in alarm

Gaza’s children screaming…

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE DEAD AMONG US

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read138 views

Dust floats and turns in shafts of filtered sunlight

as son, grandsons, friends carry in the coffin

of that lovely, gracious woman. Her husband,

now wheelchair-bound, weeps, and is comforted.

The Offices of the Dead begin. Outside

the fields and hedgerows of the parish shimmer.

 

The church door is wide because of the heat.

From my pew I can see through the lychgate

to where the undertaker’s men are chatting.

The hatchback of the hearse is open.

A tractor with a hay baler passes.

 

‘There is a green hill far away’, we sing,

and ‘In England’s green and pleasant land’.

All is movement, and flux – the dead among us

the only stillness.

 

 

 

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POETRY

WILDFIRE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read122 views

Mynydd Helygain – Halkyn Mountain – despite

its name is a long, high, flat-topped hill

above the Welsh shore of the Dee Estuary.

Its plateau – with views of: the mountain ranges

of Snowdonia; the Dee and the Mersey;

the Wirral Peninsula; Liverpool

and its hinterland – is ancient commonland

of woods of oak and ash, heaths of gorse

and bracken, and disused lead workings

once exploited by the 20th Legion.

 

The farmed fields on its slopes today are parched,

flaxen after so many rainless weeks

and unremitting sun. The lagoons

in the estuary’s marshland are drying –

but not its grasses or the stems of its flowers,

which are a vivid, pristine green from its rich muds

with aeons of moisture. And a warm wind

from the north, yes, warm, as breath, fills the air

with the scent of yarrow from the wetlands’ margins.

 

Suddenly from the hill top dense black smoke

erupts. The wind blows strands south, and another

thick plume appears perhaps a mile away,

whisked rapidly southerly into the sky.

And the land may burn for hours, for weeks.

Here at sea level we can only see the smoke –

but know the flames will soon arrive on our phones:

in the palms of our hands the end of days.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CITY OF AWESOME NIGHT, CITY OF PERPETUAL LIGHT

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read200 views

Noxie and his mates Wexa, Holo and Taz

must somehow, somewhere, have had to scale

the railway embankment’s vertical wall

and head for the cast iron parapet wall

above the three railway arches – that house

a wine bar, a seafood restaurant

and a Nepali dumpling outlet –

to daub their tags, their noms de plumes in white paint

forty feet or so above the street.

 

I am processing this in the early hours

from my budget hotel bedroom opposite.

I am assuming that Noxie and the lads –

though perhaps some or all of them were lasses? –

left their marks at such a time, when the street

was empty but the eateries still well-lit

as if they had just opened for the evening.

 

Beyond the railway embankment –

which, after the arches, becomes a bridge

across the River Thames – I can see

the spire of The Shard, its coloured lights

shimmering like a fairground ride.

The remaining sixty five floors of

apartments, hotel and offices

are out of sight but no doubt lit up.

 

Looking more closely now I notice that

in the window of the seafood restaurant

there is a video on a loop showing

a pair of hands endlessly dressing a crab.

I recall that the Thames is suffering

from an invasion of the predatory

Moon Crab. Unbidden, yet apposite to this

dystopian scene, the refrain from

Spenser’s Prothalamion comes to mind:

‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song’.

 

I close the curtains, and go back to bed.

I dream of Noxie scaling the Shard crabwise

in absolute darkness.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MURMURATIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read132 views

Starlings swarming with the fluidity of

waves, fast wings murmuring almost like bees,

is a phenomenon that might have engaged

Busby Berkeley, Aesop, and Jesus:

for their balletic, airy precision;

for their safety in numbers regarding

the confusion of buzzards and the finding

of worms in winter and seeds in summer;

for their collective abnegation of self.

Consider the starling!

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE SUGARCANE FIELD

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read138 views

South of Isandlwana, Rourke’s Drift, Spion Kop

in KwaZulu-Natal, near Bergville

in the Tugela Valley, one March,

we saw the signs of the beginning

of autumn in the southern hemisphere:

tiny, white and infrequent clouds appearing

over the Drakensberg. Beside the pathway

to the sangoma’s kraal – the house

of a local woman, a handsome woman

in her thirties, calm, gentle, commanding,

a healer, a diviner – a small field

of sugarcane rustled, whispered.

 

 

 

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