POETRY

POETRY

CLUELESS IN GAZA

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

For Drew Steele

 

Two old men, one with a raggedy spray tan,

the other an industrial comb-over,

sat facing representatives of the world’s

media outlets, who appeared to believe

that public pronouncements by the one

with the orange face and the white hands

were to be understood literally.

 

Behind them a high-banked

coal fire appeared to blaze and crackle

in the hearth of a mantelpiece laden

with gilded objects. The older man

had – to ‘Stupéfaction Mondiale’,

as the headline in Libération put it –

just outlined his real estate plan

for one hundred and forty square miles of land

in the so-called Middle East, a plot

about the size of Las Vegas but with

a population two thirds the size.

 

The younger man smirked briefly. Few noticed

that, in the proposal for the final

solution to Gaza’s long history of

mayhem, the number of Gazans cited

was at least half a million fewer

than the estimate fifteen months before.

But, anyway, the whole lot would be cleansed.

 

Neither of the senior citizens

mentioned then, or subsequently, that beneath

the rubble-strewn and charnel house surface

of the Strip, and its contiguous seabed,

are extensive, untapped and unfracked

reserves of oil and gas.

 

 

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POETRY

VESTIGES

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

We followed the signs from the car park.

Set on a promontory high above

the Bay of Episkopi, more or less intact,

was a Roman stadium, of classical

Olympic dimensions – eight runners,

two chariots’ wide. The early spring

late afternoon sun lit beige sandstone blocks

too big for the natives to have purloined.

As we were leaving a flock of goats chimed

in the scrub beside the stadium’s back wall.

 

That part of Cyprus officially

is British Overseas Territory,

as sovereign as, say, Salisbury Plain.

We passed an armed camp with high fences

and barrack huts and then, distantly

and also fenced, family quarters –

an estate of white semis with pitched roofs.

 

Only days after we had returned home

Tornados from RAF Akrotiri

launched missiles at sites in Syria.

Much of Eurasia is littered with

imperial ruins.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

AT FAST EDDIES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.7K views

The world has turned many times since I was last

at Fast Eddies on 4th Street in Alton,

Illinois, a Mississippi river town –

just after the First Gulf War to be exact.

Then Fast Eddies was a long, ill-lit room

with a bar and kitchen, wooden tables,

backless benches, and something of a

reputation. I had my pocket picked.

                               ***

Until the end of the Civil War

Missouri was a ‘slave’ state Illinois

a ‘free’ state. ‘Runaways’ would try to cross

the wide and headlong river to seek out

Alton’s few abolitionists, and then

be sent along the Underground Railway

north and east into safer states. The town,

however, was home to would-be slave owners,

settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee.

In the town’s cemetery – on top

of a chain of limestone bluffs that flank

the Mississippi at this point – is a

monument of big city proportions

placed so that it can be seen from across

the river. It is in memory of

Elijah P. Lovejoy, abolitionist

and champion of free speech, silenced

by a murderous pro-slavery mob.

                               ***

On the bluffs beside the Great River Road,

below the town, the first people painted

a giant bird, The Piasa – a creature

of myth, covered in multi-coloured scales,

with an eagle’s beak, and a fox’s head

surmounted by horns, that terrorised

the innocent in these fertile lands.

The people were exiled or slaughtered.

Archaeologists curate what they have left.

                               ***

The world has turned many, many times since.

Now at Fast Eddies there are neon lights,

live music, and cocktails, the furniture

is cabaret style, and customers dance

with iPhones on the website. But the beer

is still Budweiser from St Louis,

on the opposite bank of the river,

and the clientele is still entirely white.

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POETRY

AMONG THE BARBARIANS

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

Not long before Vladimir Putin was first

crowned president in the Kremlin cathedral

where the Romanovs had been coronated

Tzars, we were lunching in a self-service

restaurant near Red Square – with vodka shots

for a rouble by the till. As we finished eating

a young man on his own at the next table

leaned over and spoke: ‘May I speak English

to practise, please?’ He was a Japanese

political science graduate student,

he said. He had flown from his home city,

Kyoto, to Vladivostok, and taken

the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow

(via Lake Baikal and Omsk) to study

the decline and fall of Boris Yeltsin –

and had stayed on temping as a translator.

He asked where we were from, and, when we told him,

“Chester”, expressed delight. He had visited

our ‘home city’ on a tour of Europe

with his parents. He remembered its central

thoroughfares following the pattern

of the Roman camp it was named for –

and described the first floor Victorian

shopping arcades, which line parts of those streets,

and which the last Kaiser had much admired.

The three of us shared our wonder at the world’s

smallness – and then were silent, thinking, no doubt,

of vastnesses travelled, and imperial

mishaps. This student of politics

exuded loneliness, but we had appointments

to keep at Lenin’s Mausoleum,

and so we wished him well.

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POETRY

A BREAK IN THE JOURNEY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.5K views

We were driving from Paris to Bordeaux one

particularly hot August, more than

forty years ago now, through the shimmering

grasslands and sun flowers of the Beauce,

and decided to break our journey

at Niort. We stayed near La Venise Verte,

tree-lined canals constructed from marshland,

Marais Poitevin, reclaimed from the sea.

We hired a barque – a flat-bottomed boat

like a punt – and made our ungainly way,

far from autoroutes and determined cities,

past pollarded alders and under arching

willows, out of the August sun, noisily

at first, then silently, to a place

of dappled light, of almost tangible

stillness, of water and leaves, and the soft

murmuring of oceans.

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POETRY

MERRY-GO-ROUND

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.4K views

Our hotel was a dozen or more tram stops

from Prague’s city centre. Converted

from a Soviet-era apartment block

to cater for the influx of tourists

after the Velvet Revolution,

it faced a large rectangle of open ground,

flat and bare. On the other three sides

were similar blocks, but still used for families.

In the middle was a small carousel

and, to one side, a mobile shop selling

alcohol and cigarettes – Freedom’s

enterprising dividends. The hotel

welcomed groups – like the excited party

of Israeli High School students and teachers,

with their Mossad minders, jackets bulging,

waiting in the foyer, as we arrived,

for coaches to take them to the Ghetto.

                               ***

Hitler declared that the Ghetto be preserved –

once Prague had been pronounced wholly ‘Judenrein’ –

as if an exhibit in a museum.

In the Old Jewish Cemetery,

along the horizontal edges 

of the tomb of the scholar and mystic

Rabbi Judah Levai ben Bezalel

aka Rabbi Loew small stones rest.

According to German Jewish folklore

the Rabbi could conjure, in times of trouble,

a redemptive golem out of the mud

and clay of the wide Vlatava close by.

When the city was part of the Habsburg

Empire, because of its many gilded

cupolas, it was ‘Das Goldene Stadt’.

                                 ***

Our room overlooked the open ground.

Adults were queuing at the shop, and

children turning on the roundabout. We could hear

its generator’s wheezy chug-chug,

and the tinkling of a waltz. On its roof

were clumsy images of clowns painted

in a faded yellow. The street lamps came on.

Snow began to fall as the coaches returned,

their passengers subdued.

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