POETRY

POETRY

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

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

The hardback quarto exercise book opens
at ‘Funny Valentine’, an unfinished,
blank verse piece – full of Auden, Larkin, Yeats –
in thick-nib fountain pen on feint ruled lines.
Four decades old and more – and pristine:
‘Today, at best, brings scented, satin hearts,
Numb messengers of somebody’s desires…’

I can see the back room in the shared flat:
sagging bed, faded armchair, torn carpet,
wobbly table; I’d brought a large ashtray,
a glass fronted bookcase and a small, handmade
Chinese cabinet; a tv blared upstairs.
Through the sash window stuck fast with paint
was the littered garden – out of sight and
sound, all of Liverpool, swinging city.

I google Lorenz Hart’s lyrics – ‘Your looks
are laughable, unphotographable,
Yet you’re my favorite work of art’- and hear
Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald.
The cabinet – carved drawers filled now with years
of love – was a woman’s gift to a man
coming of age. But I was a boy, full
of fears and words. ‘Stay little valentine, stay…’
Borne on the leafy fretwork of the doors,
two gilded, lacquered kingfishers in flight,
sun catching on their iridescent wings,
fall together into oblivion.

 

 

Note: the poem was one of the first pieces to be published on the site in April 2009  and has been subsequently published in ‘A Jar of Sticklebacks’ – http://www.armadillocentral.com/general/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-by-david-selzer

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE OUTING

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

Each Armistice Day, she remembered it.
A walk along the riverbank. Her teacher took them –
one Saturday when the hawthorn was out
and the river slow after weeks of sun –
her and three of the other older girls.
Miss Davies’ young man came too –
in his uniform, on leave from the front.

When they all rested in the shade of a willow,
he unwrapped a large bar of chocolate
slowly, looking away, or pretending to,
across the river.  Suddenly he turned.
‘Voila!’, he said, holding it out to them.
‘Pour vous. From plucky little Belgium.’

Miss Davies and her young man went and sat
at the river’s edge, their heads almost touching.
Two of her friends began whispering – another
pursed her lips and kissed the air. The others giggled.
She lay back – and squinted at the sun through the branches.
‘Look’, said one of the girls. The soldier was pretending
to dip the toe of his boot in the water.
Miss Davies laughed.

On the way back, ‘Listen’, he said, and they stopped.
On the dappled path, blocking their way,
a song thrush was striking a snail on a stone
again and again and again.

 

 

Note: the poem was one of the first pieces to be published on the site in April 2009  and has been subsequently published in ‘A Jar of Sticklebacks’ – http://www.armadillocentral.com/general/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-by-david-selzer

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ERDDIG: REFLECTIONS ON PATRIMONY

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read1.8K views

From the corner summerhouse set in the wall,

the towering lime trees between the canals –

at the eastern end of the formal garden –

are still leafless, like jet lace work, like nets

disentangling, against the light blue skies

and the white, driven, cumulus clouds of March.

 

This was a medium-sized business. They made

their money the usual gentry way from rents

plus coal, were typically self-sufficient,

using and selling their managed timber,

were unusually innovative in

hydraulic projects, exploiting Afon Ddu,

the stream that flows through the estate, named black

for the coal dust gathering in its bed.

The pit they owned was a couple of miles

away, its slagheap, now greening, still

clearly visible from the west front.

Factories took the small tenant farmers, wars

the gardeners and nationalisation

literally undermined the house. The last squire –

Oxbridge, of course, then priest manqué, thespian,

war service, holiday tour courier

before inheriting –  bequeathed house, gardens,

park, his redundant patrimony,

to the National Trust’s service industry

of conservation, crafts and carrot cake.

 

In October when the apples and the pears,

in all their traditional varieties,

have been harvested and the grounds are full

of diverse families and music plays,

there is a sense of something shared – not a

common culture but a moment of ease

and tranquillity, an event of order

and fruition before the sweet dusk enfolds.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE OPTIMISM OF ENGINEERS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2.2K views

For John Huddart

 

Whichever way you approach the town of Fflint,

on the coast road east or west, down Halkyn

Mountain, from the Dee Estuary, you see

the towers first – Richard, Bolingbroke and Castle

Heights, three 1960s, multi-storey

social housing blocks – not the castle.

 

Richard Plantagenet, Richard of Bordeaux,

King of England, surrendered to his cousin

and childhood friend, Henry of Bolingbroke,

in the inner bailey of the castle,

nearly seven hundred years ago.

Richard’s great grandfather had it built –

by engineers, carpenters, charcoal burners,

diggers, dykers, masons, smiths, woodmen

from the counties of Chester, Lancaster,

Leicester, Lincoln, Salop, Stafford, Warwick –

based on a French model. Logistically –

being merely a day’s ride from Chester

and having the estuary lap its walls –

it was well placed to punish the Welsh.

 

In the ‘70s, as well as the Heights,

Courtaulds dominated the town, its mills

employing ten thousand. Now there is

MacDonalds, Sainsbury’s, a Polski Sklep.

The castle’s ruins have been preserved, of course,

made accessible, and its setting landscaped.

Across the wide river are the white houses

of Parkgate, where the packets to Ireland

would moor offshore in the roads.

Canalising the Dee to keep Chester

a port for sea-going fly boats and cutters

silted that side of the estuary,

transformed Liverpool and the Mersey.

 

A purpose-made barge passes, Afon

Dyfrdwy, taking an A380 wing

from Airbus at Broughton to the port

at Mostyn, some twenty miles, for shipment,

by purpose-made ferries, to Bordeaux.

As if on cue, a Beluga, an Airbus

Super Transporter, its nose like the fish’s

head, banks south east for Airbus at Toulouse.

 

The castle was closed for a time because of

vandalism and under age drinking.

Two teenage youths, wielding a six-pack each

of Sainsbury’s St Cervois lager,  pass

beneath the curtain wall. Laughing,

they offer the cans to two elderly

anglers returning from the river,

who decline, embarrassed, and move on.  It is

one o’clock on a weekday. The two lads,

both opening a can and showering

each other, run towards the shore, cursing.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

AND WITH A LITTLE PIN

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

On liberty’s last morning, he said mass

in the Great Tower – the chapel was cold

as winter. August’s sun warmed the rebels

riding along the estuary shore,

their drums silent. He watched from the walls.

At his back, the seas breaking on Ireland. King

and Usurper, first cousins, exchanged

purple words in the base court, a surfeit of

epithets: bombast, self-pity. Serfs

were indifferent but Richard’s dog fawned

on new majesty. The epicure

who bespoke a coat of cloth of gold

rode captive from Fflint to London in the same

suit of clothes. Through Chester he was jeered, stoned.

 

Twenty miles inland,  a sandstone hill

– sheer to the west – rises from the plain.

Parliament’s army sacked the castle.

Westwards there is the estuary’s mouth,

the livid sea. Above twitching fern,

a hawk stoops. Stones, flung into the well’s blackness,

fall through the hill seawards and never sound.

 

 

Note: the poem was originally published on the site September 2009.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE WRECK OF THE SS ROTHESAY CASTLE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

A dirty night in the Menai Straits…

a paddle steamer on a sudden sandbank –

pounding itself, pounding itself, pounding…

seas silencing the hullabaloo.

 

For the last time, the lifeboat pulls for the shore.

Two lovers, roped to the mast, drown their joy.

 

All turned to chalk on the dark sea bed.

Far, far above was the muffled cry

of gulls, the cormorant’s swift shadow.

 

 

Note: the poem was originally published on the site in November 2009.

 

 

 

 

 

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