POETRY

POETRY

THE LAST CLOCK

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

As a wave breaking then breaking then breaking

and, finally, falling, dispersing on the sands,

the red azalea bloomed then the crimson

camellia, the purple magnolia

and the white weeping cherry – its blossoms,

the silk folds of its petals, April’s winds

and showers were scattering like snowflakes.

 

After, the unfolding flesh of the leaves,

contoured like malachite, sturdy as stone

seemingly, seduces. How can this surprise

more and more each year, as if unknown, unseen?

A grasping of life before the last clock

– tickety tock, tickety tock – strikes?

 

 

 

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POETRY

SUCH PEOPLE TO LOVE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

As I leaf through the three albums you have made –

mostly of your photographs plus some

of my poems – one book for each of her years –

I realise we are ready for the fourth

and how every day of every

year has been as full as a lifetime.

 

You have only caught her best side – quite right

too – as she grows up into her self: none

of those heartbreaking, fearful tantrums where

her world becomes chaotic, senseless with

her sense of injustice in a world of giants.

 

I almost write ‘the miracle of her growth’,

though godless – ‘wonder’ will do just as well.

And I wonder what she will be at fourteen,

thirty four, fifty four…and what her world

will be like. Ah, immortal longings –

to try to conjure the future as if

I might be there! Who would have thought when I was

four that hearts would be transplanted, glaciers

melt – and I would have such people to love?

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

DARK SOUL OF THE NIGHT

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

‘Oh the mind, mind has mountains.’ Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

Death ends but not every day dies with sleep.

Engines grind down at the darkened cross roads –

passengers tilt forward, cargoes shift –

then – headlights sweeping the room’s bare walls,

slashing the night – accelerate out of reach:

goods secured, people insouciant.

 

In the silence, in the empty stillness

that follows, I am awake, restless, waiting

then nightmared. I cannot control, resist –

whatever they are – ordinary thoughts,

admonishing angels, sheer demons. They

scale me, plunge me… Next day, all day, I feel

I have been in madness.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE FALL OF SPARROWS

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

Commensal with humans for 10,000 years,

since the first cultivation of barley

and wheat, the house sparrow, that communal

eater of insects and seeds, is ubiquitous –

from Kolkata to Coventry, Haifa

to Hawaii – sometimes a pest, a pet

or on a plate; a symbol of lechery

or vulgarity – but in decline here

because of pesticides perhaps

or mobile phones, car parks, unleaded petrol.

 

Certainly, we miss the small flocks in the shrubs

and their rapid, ceaseless chatterings.

A lone bird appears occasionally,

silent mostly but for the odd, ‘chirrup, chirrup’.

So, as Hamlet says, ‘…we defy augury.

There’s a special providence in the fall

of a sparrow… if it be not now,

yet it will come – the readiness is all.’

 

 

 

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POETRY

CHARITY

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read1.9K views

The gusts of wind, that fling the scattered rain

against the panes and flail the eucalyptus –

which jerks as if a frantic, shaken doll –

are lowing in the chimney like an owl.

I draw the curtains as the twilight goes,

switch on the laptop and begin to write,

thinking of those who are without – homeless,

hungry, thirsty – no more than a mile

let alone a continent away.

Though giving assuages, on stormy,

desperate nights, survivor’s guilt intrudes

like a draught. Can we only save, at best,

ourselves and not the world?

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE COAT HANGER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

It is wooden, a gent’s, with ‘Elder Dempster’

machined then varnished into one of

the shoulders. It belonged to the shipping line

which plied between Liverpool and Lagos,

via Freetown and Accra. It was purloined,

accidentally or otherwise,

by my father or mother, possibly

the latter on her last trip home, with me

in her womb, to ensure a safer birth

in temperate climes –  U-Boats permitting.

 

He died of septicaemia three months

after I was born – from an ill judged

operation. ‘If I had been there…’

– she was a nurse – ‘…if I had been there…’

became the refrain of her widowhood,

with its depression and eventual

alcohol. When I was small she told me,

over and over, tales of that journey –

the traders from Accra rowing alongside,

the thunderstorms breaking over the mountains

of Sierra Leone, the ship’s captain

taking the vessel out of the convoy,

heading for the Sargasso Sea then north east

for home, always in plain sight but no booty

for a U-Boat captain also heading home.

 

For Aristotle, tokens of whatever

kind were a poor means by which to move

the action on. Life, however, though not

often, sometimes trumps art. This wooden

token of a skeleton tells a story.

 

 

 

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