POETRY

POETRY

AT THE END OF THE PIER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

Past Songs of Yesteryear, Mystic Morgana,

and other booths – purveying Flags of the World,

Country & Western Memorabilia,

Decorous South Sea Shells, Home Made Welsh Fudge;

past the sustainable hardwood benches

with withered in memoriam bouquets;

over the planking with its measured gaps

through which to view, like a bioscope,

the incoming tide shimmy then shake

the fronds of bronze weeds among the rocks,

slap, strike the elegant, cast iron stanchions;

next to where even the line fishermen

are starting to stow their gear, as an east wind

begins to blow, is the Mariner’s Lounge

with its faux fishing nets, its mounted

plastic cod, its framed chart of the North Wales coast.

 

Those Tinsel and Turkey pensioners

adventurous enough to leave their hotels –

crescented along the town’s North Shore –

are sipping, with the odd Walkers’ crisp,

a Rombout’s coffee, a Gallo chardonnay,

a Carling, a Guinness, and watching

Hollywood tv repeats in HD

as sudden rain squalls against the glass.

 

Oh, to be transported warmly, safely,

to Beverly Hills – via Mulholland Drive

and Santa Monica Boulevard –

where, to portentous chords, perfect mysteries

are perfectly solved by pensionable folk!

 

 

 

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POETRY

HUMAN HANDS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

For Howard Gardener, Arthur Kemelman and Mike Rogerson

 

How I envy them to make with their fingers

precisely what their imaginations

and knowledge dictates! I have watched for hours

a plasterer creating surfaces

smooth as silk, a bricklayer building

an oriel window. I have three

disparate friends, each of them a stranger

to the others, but with this common skill.

One inlays turned olive wood with the green

of malachite, the blue of lapis

and the brilliance of gold leaf. Another,

to classic specifications, fashions

a guitar, constructs a steam engine.

The third is a surrealist sculptor

in paper, a dada master of drawing,

a pointillist painter of the absurd.

They are perfectionists, enamoured,

respectful of the materials they use,

heirs to such long traditions.

 

 

Note: Howard Gardener – http://www.howardgardener.co.uk/, Arthur Kemelman – https://www.etsy.com/people/arthurfred

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.4K views

William the Conqueror’s fleet – of perhaps

five hundred long boats – assembled

in the Bay of the Somme. ‘History’

more or less rhymes with ‘irony’. The river

flowed through the flat bottomed chalky valley

steadily then and the years of the battle.

As the world has warmed, the water table

has risen, creating fens and marshes –

calm, bosky stretches catching the empty sky.

 

***

 

Numbers, for the most part, are abstract, even

of the British dead and wounded that first day –

slightly less than fifty eight thousand,

the population of present day

Aldershot, Bebington, Tunbridge Wells.

 

What is concrete is that those undernourished

young British men (my age or less when I

first read about them) climbed the ladders

up the trench walls, crossed no-man’s-land, marched

in lock step to death each carrying –

in addition to their Lee-Enfield rifle –

an entrenching tool, two gas helmets,

two grenades, two sandbags, two hundred

and twenty rounds of ammunition,

a pair of wire cutters, and extra rations

of corned beef, condensed milk and hard tack.

 

***

 

Innumerable raindrops still course beneath

the unanswered roll-calls of cemeteries

whose white grave markers parade in lock step,

a permanent muster of ignorant,

frail, oblivious boys.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A PUBLIC MAN

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

i.m. David Robinson

 

At the celebration of his life –

in an erstwhile garrison church now

educational centre – there was music,

applause, laughter, sadness, his cardboard coffin

with red roses and his panama hat.

And it was as if he were there – as he was,

for sure, in the gathered memories

of the many present and the many,

in absentia, who had written.

The order of service commanded

‘All Sing The Red Flag’, and printed the words –

and most did, not just the comrades like us

who savoured and relished his serious joke.

 

Gathered outside in the soft May light,

greeting friends and colleagues then watching

as the cortège took its gradual leave, we

found ourselves applauding in that public place.

 

There are some you cannot believe are dead.

You would be unsurprised if they turned up

one day and continued a conversation

they had begun a week before, a decade.

So as I walk the Millennium Greenway –

part of the old Cheshire Lines railway

recycled (pun intended) – I can imagine

his cycling towards me, stopping, listening,

laughing richly at ironies then tell me,

with charm and gravitas, what I need to know.

 

 

 

Note: The poem was originally published in May 2015.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K views

The American swing in its oak shelter

with a living roof sprouting carved tusks or

dragons teeth is very RHS Wisley.

My five year old grand daughter has just

ridden on it and is now pushing it

for the pleasure of others until a tall,

lithe boy of twelve or thirteen arrives

and begins to punt it slowly at first

then faster and higher but always

with care. She joins him, holding the ropes,

urging the swing, and leads the ecstatic

laughter of all the children gripping

the bench as it launches to the sky

and returns to earth, again and again.

Suddenly, I think of Holden Caulfield,

lost, gentle, loving, and his ‘goddam choice’

for what he would wish to be – catching

children in the fields of rye before they fall

out of reach, out of sight, over and over.

 

 

 

Note: An American swing comprises a PE or old fashioned school bench (without the feet) that is hung from ropes or chains and that moves like a saw or a pendulum from side to side – rather than to and fro like the conventional single seat swing. Like the Indian swing, which moves to and fro, the American swing will accommodate more than one person. At the time of posting, this one has been removed. In Surrey, where Wisley is situated, there are, it appears,  risk averse literati.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

INNER MARSH FARM HIDE, BURTON MERE WETLANDS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2K views

We have made the longish walk from the car park

on the decking through the marsh marigolds.

Before us is a teeming shallow lagoon.

Beyond are mixed woods, pastoral farmland

and a white house on the ridge of what was

the coast of the estuary before

the river silted and the marsh grew.

Behind the hide is a railway embankment –

the thrum of the odd diesel from Neston

to Wrexham and back baffled by the noise

of the cacophonous colony

of black headed gulls nesting on a islet.

Unaided we spotted those – and a shelduck

with its fancy red stripe and two shovellers

with their iridescent heads but are helped

with avocet, black tailed godwits and ruff.

 

We are the OCD species. Each member

of this ‘parlement of foules’ has at least

two names and a full biography

in many languages. How self-absorbed

they are! A solitary, silent coot

seems oblivious of the flock of gulls.

 

Here are serious folk with serious gear –

some of it camouflaged – who speak in subdued

encyclopaedic tones: strangers, kindly

in this companionable wooden hut –

which is a testament to human

vision, diligence and engineering –

unafraid to talk to strangers in this

always now fearful, riven land with its

taxonomies of hate.

 

 

 

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