POETRY

POETRY

WITNESS THIS ARMY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K views

During the interval, after act three

of Glinka’s opera, ‘Ivan Susannin’ –

pre-revolution, ‘A Life for the Tzar’ –

Stalin would leave his box at the Bolshoi.

In the fourth act, Ivan, the peasant, lures

the Polish Army out of Smolensk

and into a profound, winter forest.

They are lost. In the last act, they kill him.

Deep in the Katyn woods near Smolensk, pines

darkened the clearing where thousands, thousands

of Polish officers turned to earth.

So many crimes unpunished, dead unnamed.

‘O, Polnische Kamerad, wo sind

der Juden?’ ‘Majdanek, Chelmno, Oswiecim.’

An epoch has the tyrants it preserves,

even for an eggshell.

 

 

Note: The poem was first published on the site in January 2010

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

THE GOOD WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.9K views

for Alan Horne

 

They seldom mentioned it and never

to the boys at the town’s Grammar School,

thinking they might mock it as vain-glory –

or just mock it, with their disregard

for school uniform, their penchant for

RAF great coats and graffited knapsacks,

their puzzlement on Remembrance Day,

and the Vietnam War flickering nightly.

 

It was usually only as an apt

aside, at break or dinner time, to those

of us young enough to be their sons,

about a colleague: Edward at Tobruk,

André a Japanese POW,

Ken at Dunkirk, Bernard the navigator

in a Mosquito, John on Sword Beach…

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

‘FOR I WILL CONSIDER MY CAT JEFFROY’

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K views

‘For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.’  Christopher Smart

 

Unlike kind Kit Smart, incarcerated,

by his father-in-law, in bedlam –

and estranged from his children forever –

I do not have a cat. I have the neighbour’s.

I think there is only one though it dresses

in ginger, tortoiseshell, Friesian, motley,

whatever. It is ‘the Devil, who is death’

for it stalks the wren, the blackbird, the robin,

that sing and nest. Poor Christopher – busy hack,

fine poet – died a debtor, without Jeffroy,

in prison. Could he hear the red kites

long, sad whistle above the sewer

and the rats chatter? Our robins sang arias

all day. Now they have gone – for somewhere to breed

safe and sure from a cat of disguises –

leaving a clutch of sky blue eggs unhatched.

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

THE PAINTER

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

Her mother fixes a sheet of A4,

with a strip of masking tape top and bottom,

to the white board on the easel and ties

an apron round the little artist, who,

when she pulls the wrapping off the present

knows immediately what it is, holding

the child-size plastic palette exactly

as she should. Having chosen the colours –

her favourites: yellow, green, orange, red –

her mother places the paints in the wells.

She chooses a brush, begins, protrudes her tongue,

embodying concentration. There is

nothing random here. Her intellectual

eye intuitively knows where to place

each stroke – dry-brush, under-paint, scumble –

and paint over to create new colours

and shades, changing brushes for breadth, depth

and finesse – and knows when it is finished.

Untaught or, rather, unspoiled, she has begun

with abstraction: with colour, texture, form,

making them one, an aspiration

that transcends tens of millennia.

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

ACROSS THE WATERS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

Walking – toward the town – down Henlys Lane,

its low, lichen covered dry stone walls

adorned with bird’s-foot trefoil, its borders

with cow parsley and, where run-off

gathers from Baron’s Hill, red campion,

we note ahead, amongst the cattle,

the usual, large flock of herring gulls,

facing south in the low-lying marshy field.

All as we have come to know and like.

But, today, we hear an explosion – loud

enough but too workaday to be thunder.

We stop and look beyond the library,

the castle and the Straits to search the mauve

galleries of Bethesda’s slate quarries.

Nothing disturbs the distant, hazy stillness.

 

Later, on the way to the car, we pass

the unfinished Plantagenet castle

the final subjection of the Welsh made

redundant and hear a second blasting

from across the waters – and I know

how favoured our generation was removed

from wars, and how, like flowers, tenuous,

robust, our path to the future or the past.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

PLAY STATION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

We are zapping Lego Star Wars’ characters.

Patiently, she shows me how to handle

the console – its buttons and paddle.

How kind she is about my ineptitude!

She commentates throughout. I am a convert.

This is no more solitary than reading –

with a work-out of psycho-motor skills!

 

But she is passive watching ‘Ninjago’ –

its violence, rudeness, a lack of irony,

a plenty of sarcasm – and its Lego

manikins: humour bypass, prosthetic hands,

stunted vocal range, corporate creatures

stumping through their weatherless universe

in full-length feature advertisements.

 

She begins to recover,  trying to

balance a peacock feather on her palm.

We suggest the park where she has learned to climb

a holly tree – up inside the branches,

thick with dark leaves and bright with berries

in the mellow, October weather.

 

She scoots through the park gates before us

but swiftly reappears. “Grandma, Grandpa, look!”

and points. The autumn’s leaves are spread on paths

and grass like golden snow.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments

Recent Posts