POETRY

POETRY

SEAMUS HEANEY: A LIVERPOOL MEMORY

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2K views

After the reading, we strolled down Brownlow Hill

for a Guinness and a chaser at The Vines

next to The Adelphi on Lime Street –

a Walker’s pub in Edwardian baroque.

The westering sun lit the stained glass windows.

 

We were both young men then. He had been married

the year before. I would be married

later that year. His first book had been published

by Faber and Karl Miller’s prescient review

seemed genuinely to bemuse and amuse him.

We talked of the city’s sectarian split –

the Orange annual march, with drums and fifes,

to Newsham Park, their annual outing

by train to Southport past the Scotland Road flats

festooned with green – curtains, tablecloths.

 

The University was generous

with expenses and paid for a taxi

to Speke.  He had a flight booked to Le Touquet

and a hire car there he would drive through the night

into Italy to join his wife.

He was so unostentatious, so

matter-of-fact, that such travel plans

seemed perfectly ordinary to someone

who had no licence and had only

been abroad on a school trip to San Malo!

 

As he got in the cab and we shook hands,

I knew I had met a particularly

memorable person – modest, kind

and witty – who happened also to be

especially, exceptionally talented.

 

When I opened The Door Into The Dark

some three years later and read ‘Night Drive’ –

 

The smells of ordinariness

Were new on the night drive through France;

Rain and hay and woods on the air

Made warm draughts in the open car.

 

Signposts whitened relentlessly.

Montrueil, Abbeville, Beauvais

Were promised, promised, came and went,

Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

 

A combine groaning its way late

Bled seeds across its work-light.

A forest fire smouldered out.

One by one small cafés shut.

 

I thought of you continuously

A thousand miles south where Italy

Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

Your ordinariness was renewed there.

 

– I knew I had been privileged and lucky

that summer evening to shake hands with

a compassionate genius, romantic,

urbane: a maker of exquisite art

out of the everyday.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

KITES FLYING

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

Suddenly, two orange delta kites

with multi-coloured tails, rise above

the families on the beach – looping the loop,

separately, together, flying

in parallel, swooping, soaring, the air

thrumming like a drum roll against the fabric –

flown faultlessly by an elderly man

with glasses, tee-shirt, shorts, dark socks, trainers

and a baseball cap. A woman, distracting

an infant, points to the skies – otherwise

no one else seems to have seen something amazing:

a grandma fetches ice creams; a youth

in lycra is texting; a small girl in pink

continues her digging.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE SUDDEN RAT

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

Early one sunlit summer evening,

on the patio next to the urn,

a brown rat appears, not, as usual,

scurrying in briefest light from dark place

to darker place, but stationary,

as if paralysed, right jaw bleeding, torn.

Then it staggers fitfully a step.

 

We wonder what to do. Take a stick,

like Philip Larkin to the rabbit

traumatised with mxyomatosis?

 

The neighbour’s fat tabby cat – that saunters

through our garden like a colonial –

arrives. It jousts with the dying rat,

a tenth of its size, like a stuffed toy.

 

Next time we look, the rat is on its back

in rigour mortis. A fly buzzes.

What had maimed it? The bourgeois cat would flinch.

Was it dropped from a height by a novice

among the suburb’s small flock of buzzards?

 

We postpone action till the morning, hoping

some predator would remove the corpse.

As the poet opined to the rabbit,

‘You may have thought things would come right again

If only you could keep quite still and wait.’

 

Next day, the rat’s still there. We bury it.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

WEST KIRBY, WIRRAL

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

I can see here the curvature and compass

of the world. From the embankment that

separates the enclosed, salt-water Marina –

crowded today with summer holiday

novice canoeists – from the Dee Estuary,

I can see, east, a hundred metres away,

The Promenade; south – beyond the dinghies

moored midstream, their halyards tinkling

in the steady breeze – the white cooling towers

and the cable-stayed bridge at Connah’s Quay;

west, Flintshire’s industrial shore rising

steeply into the green Clwydian Hills,

where a fire has begun in the gorse

and the bracken on Holywell Common;

north west, Hilbre, island of erstwhile

pilgrimage then commerce; north – beneath

the horizon where ships wait for high tide

to cross the Liverpool Bar – West Kirby’s beach,

stretching into a mile of sand flats that ends

where the distant waves break ashen and silent.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A LONE FROG

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

The Arctic, after many a summer,

is melting and our magnolia

flowers twice. In more unenlightened times,

a lone frog, even a Common Frog,

appearing at the small water feature

enclosed by ornamental grasses

and bamboo – in a garden frogless

for all the decades we have tended it –

would have been runed with ill omens.

 

We have butterflies – a number of Peacocks,

some Large Tortoiseshells, an occasional

Comma – but cannot recall the last

caterpillar. We bought a pocket book

of butterflies for our granddaughter.

She chose it. We had seen a Purple Hairstreak

at Wisley, fluttering above the Gunnera

Manicata, the uneatable

‘Giant Rhubarb’ from the deforested

mountains of Brazil. She leafs through the pages.

 

How old will she by the time it becomes

a book of remembrance?

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE REDUNDANT MAHOUT

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

In the balmy, barmy days before conservation,

our local zoo had an Indian elephant

which gave rides, complete with howdah

and mahout. He had been recruited

from Kerala and he and has family

settled, as Commonwealth citizens,

in a small, suburban semi within sound

of imitation jungles and savannahs.

 

In time, the circus animals deserted

or were abandoned, and, as the

euphemism has it, ‘he lost his job’,

becoming a porter at the train station

(when there were such posts) –

‘Jaldi, jaldi, haathi!’ was replaced by

‘Porter, porter, sir?’ I recall him

dour in his British Rail uniform –

and, appropriately moustached,

grinning astride the elephant’s neck.

 

 

 

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