POETRY

POETRY

VIRTUTIS FORTUNA COMES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.7K views
Stepping Stones, Kettlewell © Sylvia Selzer 2007

 

Lasting longer than the Thirty Years War,

than half our biblical shelf life, this marriage

has grown like coral – drops of the slain

Medusa’s blood – become, like Corallium

Nobile, a charm against fits, poison,

sorcery, whirlwind, lightning, fire, shipwreck!

From Norway’s fjords to the Cape Verde isles,

the Niger’s delta to the Orinoco’s,

reefs build, decline: the slow massing of

defunct algae, discarded oyster shells, lost

sailors’ bones; the unmarked ebb and flow

of topless towers, clayey tenements.

So, let’s celebrate chance, charity, courage –

Fortune’s inexorable comrades.

 

 

 

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POETRY

TRIGGER AT THE ADELPHI, LIVERPOOL, MARCH, 1954

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2K views

For Alex Cox

 

This is the year Dien Bien Phu falls,

Algeria rises, segregation is

ruled illegal in the USA,

the first kidney is transplanted and UK

wartime food rationing finally ends.

 

Lime Street was filled with thousands of boys and girls,

gathered to greet the singing, celluloid,

Born Again cowpoke, Roy Rogers (erstwhile

Leonard Slye), and his entourage – combining

a promo tour with a Billy Graham

crusade. The youngsters, pinched with cold on that

blitzed and windy street, clutched their copies

of the Roy Rogers Cowboy Annual.

Those with seafaring dads – and there were ships

filling the Mersey then and its docks –

had something from the Sears catalogue

of Roy Rogers Gifts: boots, guitar, holster,

ersatz buckskin fringed shirt. (Roy and his wife, Dale,

had been mobbed in London, fringes ripped from

the genuine article). But Roy and Dale

were in bed with ‘flu in their Adelphi suite –

so Trigger trotted the route alone,

climbed the hotel steps, made his mark at

reception, entered the residents’ lounge,

visited his master’s bedroom and appeared

at a first floor window for a photo op.

 

But was it Trigger or, his double,

Little Trigger? And which rears on its hind legs

stuffed in the Roy Rogers Museum,

Branson, Missouri, the ‘Show Me’ state’?

Or is either or both with Roy and Dale –

and Bullet, the dog, of course – alive, well and

moseying along on the moon’s dark side?

 

 

 

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POETRY

ON THE NATURE OF THINGS

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.2K views

From the terrace at Polesden Lacey, it was

the guttural calls caught our attention –

then sheep flowing fast over rising ground

like a pale yellow banner in the wind,

then the shepherd himself, then his dogs

flattening themselves at his command.

By the time we reached the valley bottom,

the beasts were penned – lambs from ewes,

the latter funnelled for the shearers.

The bleating drowned the whirring of the clippers.

 

From the high bridge over the Tweed at Kelso,

we watched a fisherman upstream cast

from a skiff – his companion skulling gently

to keep steady in the current – when,

suddenly, between us and the men,

who, of course, were facing the wrong way,

two salmon leapt from the river six feet

or more and, turning,  re-entered the depths

silently. Oblivious, on those costly

waters, the ghillie rowed, his master fished.

 

 

 

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POETRY

DEDHAM VALE REVISITED

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.4K views
Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1802

 

 

Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1828

 

 

September touches the Vale like a sigh,

a mellow, fruitful suspiration

edging from green to lemon, agitating

gently the skieyest leaves. The Stour

meanders to a sea of clouds vanishing

over an unimaginable Europe.

Dedham Church, a testament to wool,

focuses an especial scene: Saxon names,

corn marigolds, skylarks and enclosures.

 

After Napoleon, Peterloo and his wife’s

slow death, another canvas shows the same

landscape. New buildings exploit the river

and the church tower is luminous yet

vulnerable, not focal, to a whorl

of cumulus billowing from beyond

the horizon over dark, distressed elms.

Crouched under the overgrown bank of a lane,

the last you see of the painting, with her tent

and her cooking pot, a tramp woman

nurses a child under the tumbling sky.[1]


[1] The poem was first published in the Anglo-Welsh Review, has previously been published on this site and is one of the most visited.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A SHIP OF FOOLS

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

The iron palace of electric light

steams into catastrophe and idiom,

a culture’s symbol of folly

and achievement.

The last, late sailing of the nineteenth century,

or the first of the next, it never arrives.

Unexpected, unheeded icebergs rise

from calm, dark seas.

The Captain loses face

and chooses death. The steerage,

having nothing to lose, gains nothing from death;

rushes from the vortex of the sinking ship

into frigid waters.

 

 

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POETRY

ONLY ONE IN STEP

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

i

 

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is

somehow very ‘Thirties: lots of chaps in

the dark behind high walls; much shadow-play

with unidentifiable voices;

belated, blinding suddenness of light.

The decade’s putative worthies (who all,

by the way, seem to have been chaps) go forth

unknowingly in parallel: e.g.

Hitler in Berchtesgarten, Wittgenstein

(Adolf’s erstwhile peer from Linz) in Cambridge.

Did Wittgenstein walk with Blunt, Philby,

Burgess and Maclean as the fifth man?

Meanwhile, elsewhere, at Trinity College

A.E. Housman tutored Enoch Powell: two

classicist lads from the West Midlands – and

the land of lost and wistful laddishness.

 

 

ii

 

Our Enoch – the wife’s second cousin twice

removed – although he always acted the

philosopher-king, indeed believed it,

in Parliament, in uniform, in the

groves of academe – appeared to labour,

tormented, in the dark, poor soul. Always

a solitary, he was chained to the

metaphysics of empire, protocol

and tribe: from the ‘Rivers of blood’ to ‘No

Surrender!’, preferring voluntary

exile to certain public failure. Yet,

see how, the fluent theme has become a

continuo – ‘influx’, ‘deluge’, ‘flood’, how

his acolytes have grown, like dragon’s teeth,

loquacious prisoners in Powell’s teeming,

booming cave of phantasmagoria.[1]


[1] The poem has previously been published on this site and is one of the most visited.

 

 

 

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