POETRY

POETRY

DYSTOPIA: A WORK IN PROGRESS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.7K views

When the British and the French almost

literally drew lines in the sand

to divvy up the Ottoman Empire –

tutored by romantic, wistful Arabists

at the Quai D’Orsay and the Foreign Office –

there was nothing left for the Yazidis,

the Druze, the Kurds… It was always about oil –

and then Sunni Arabs and Zionist Jews.

It is always about oil, diamonds,

timber, gold, slaves, coal — and useful idiots.

 

*

 

Saddam hanged, Gaddafi sodomized then shot.

Being careless about what you wish for

appears to bring bandits, to make Frankenstein

monsters out of mercenaries, assassins

out of mujahideen. Better perhaps

the secret police, with pensionable jobs,

than unofficial executioners?

Better restriction than chaos, repression

than havoc? Better to live in servitude

since death ends all chance of liberty?

 

*

 

The democratic chancellories

of Europe, its communes and councils are

panders soliciting votes from racists

to prostitute the body politic.

They make virtue of prevarication

and casuistry; extol cohesion

and nationhood; plead penury –

yet erect frontiers of razor wire

and bomb far-fetched ideologies,

making accidental martyrs and migrants.

 

*

Does only a fool or knave decry

the efficacy of aerial bombing?

Do only knaves or fools advocate peace?

Do only both call, ‘Follow the money!

It’s all about oil!’? Will it always be

about oil – until the earth has become

one unrelenting desert, one vast sea

and there is no one to care about money?

Tetchy, ironic, rhetorical

questions give no shelter, change nothing.

 

*

 

It is about oil and useful innocents

seeking exile, seeking sanctuary.

They run from the bullets at the border –

anonymous children, young men, women

in labour, grandmas – or wait, patiently

for the most part, as if despair were a crime,

as if anger were a fault, in the rain

and the smoke, or, duped, drown in silence.

Theirs has become a name, whoever they are,

to conjure pity and heart break – or lies.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

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

I have not heard a cuckoo here since childhood

when fields were wilder and trees less sparse.

I heard one this year in Gascony,

on the Plateau de Lannemazan,

on a wooded ridge with the late March winds

from the Pyrenees rasping the corn stubs

in the field below and rushing

through the budding trees bright with lichen

and ruffling the flowers on the blackthorn

and the violets among the leaf mould.

 

Between a gap in the trees the ridge way

was bare limestone. There were walnut shells

and empty 12 bore shot gun cartridges.

Before me, down the slope, was the village

that was a town until the Black Death –

fortified to subdue Basque and Occitan.

The clock on the Mairie struck a muffled hour

but the fell bird sang clearly over the wind.

 

As I descended the lane I passed a field

where an English ex-pat’s donkey brayed at me,

a Belgian’s house with dogs that yelped and howled

and a hunter walking up towards the ridge,

his gun broken on his arm. I heard dogs

and donkey distantly as he passed them –

and knew the wild woods would soon be silenced.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE RULES OF THE GAME

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.7K views

I had my first hair cut when I was three.

(I had been tricked, bamboozled, farfirt).

My grandpa took me to his barber’s –

redolent with banter and tobacco smoke –

near the junction of Cricklewood Lane

and Finchley Road. It was frequented

by his card playing cronies. I watched him

have his hair trimmed and some strands combed over.

I was invited to try the high chair

but, no sooner there, I was begowned

and the scissors flashed. ‘Fetch a policeman!’

he always claimed I called out. I imagine

a shop full of Jewish refugees laughed

uneasily at my accidental vits.

 

He smoked Craven A in an ebony

cigarette holder, drank tea from a glass

with a silver plated handle and snacked

on Rakusen’s matzos coated with

Colman’s French Mustard. When I was eight

he taught me to shuffle a deck of cards,

perfumed with nicotine, from hand to hand

then thumbs and forefingers like a croupier.

He taught me Gin Rummy where the twos

of any suit are also deuces and wild

like the jokers. We could choose whether aces

were high or low. I liked the black cards best.

 

When we were playing he would sometimes pause

to tell me stories: of Kiev; his escape

from Russia; my father; my grandmother.

We continued to play well into my teens.

There were questions I did not know how to ask

and ones then I simply did not know to ask.

I pass the tiny tales on like pieces

of a mosaic. ‘Remember’, he said,

‘for patience whichever way you shuffle

first the jokers remove!’

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

EASTER, 1916

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,

but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’

W.B Yeats, ‘Anima Hominis’, Essays (1924)

 

 

Could he hear the firing squads day after day?

Did the rattle carry from Kilmainham Gaol

to Merrion Square as the poem quickened?

 

Easter had been as late as it could be

that year. Unlikely saviours came forth,

commonplace clerks, scribblers, pedagogues.

The English sent a gunboat up the Liffey.

It hollowed out most of Sackville Street –

Clery’s, Liberty Hall, the GPO –

and the ‘terrible beauty’ was born,

the glare of rebellion, of sacrifice.

 

As the poem grew, swallows and swifts

twittered and screeched over the park in the square

and above the broken stones of the city.

 

The English, as always, overreacted:

turned, through brutality, a revolt – inept,

unpopular – into a decisive,

echoing blow for independence.

 

The swifts had gone when he finished the poem

in late September. He published it widely

four years later – via London and New York –

that murderous autumn when he knew for sure

what he had written had become true.

 

‘MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.’

 

 

 

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POETRY

TRAFFICKING IN MOCKERY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

While paupers’ bones receive scant ceremony,

a king’s skeleton toured much of Leicestershire

(excluding its now defunct coal fields) –

received a 21 gun salute,

was borne on a gun carriage, escorted

by Guides and Scouts and chaps ahorse in armour,

lay in state flanked by bowed head veterans

and was entombed in bespoke pride of place

in the restored cathedral with long queues.

 

The remains of a sensitive, serious

fellow portrayed holding his signet ring,

his seal of office, between finger and thumb,

or a witty Machiavell with some

of the best lines the Bard of Avon penned?

 

A Princess Diana moment sans tears!

All about dosh and PR for city,

county, church and varsity, hallowed

by the pretence of the veneration

of history aka monarchy –

the old English disease.

 

 

 

 

 


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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

NASTY, BRUTISH AND SHORT

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

The sun is lowering in the west by the time

I reach the site. Though the hawthorn hedges

are casting long shadows, I can see

the remains of the earth fortifications.

This fortified homestead, a quarter

of a football pitch, was lived in for

six centuries, from the so-called dark

to the so-called middle ages. It was

some ‘continuing city’ for twenty four

generations – from Aneurin’s ‘Y

Goddodin’ to Dante’s ‘La Divina

Commedia’. They kept cattle, grew crops.

gathered shell fish from the shore over the hills.

We do not know why they built here or

why they left. There are no signs of havoc –

massacre or flight – and all their dead

had been buried with due ceremony.

Maybe they had received a better offer –

servitude in return for security.

 

I feel a chill here as twilight settles,

imagining the seemingly constant threat –

and yet… We are wired for fear. Sometimes

I dread – in my centrally heated house

with security lights, fridge and freezer –

the last clutch at the heart.

 

 

 

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