POETRY

POETRY

WESTERN APPROACHES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.8K views

Almost in the middle of the North Atlantic

the two-dozen crew of a torpedoed

merchant ship are wet and cold in its lifeboat.

They are mainly Liverpool men, seafarers

from custom and necessity. The captain

is at the tiller. He has his charts

and a compass, has ordered the sail set,

water and hard tack rationed, and is steering

towards the rocky, treacherous west coast

of Ireland more than a thousand miles away –

a dangerous landfall at this time of year,

with its long seas, and a weakened crew.

 

***

 

Western Approaches Command during

the Second World War’s six yearlong Battle

of the Atlantic encompassed all

of the Irish Sea, St George’s Channel,

the north of the Celtic Sea, and longitudes

of the ocean to the west of Ireland.

 

At Liverpool’s Pier Head there is a

slightly pugnacious-looking bronze statue

of Commander Johnnie Walker RN,

famed for destroying twenty U-Boats.

 

The Liverpool docks were the destination

and fuelling station for the unceasing

convoys of merchant ships and their escorts

bringing food, fuel, munitions, tanks, aircraft,

and personnel from North America.

One hundred thousand died, Allies and Axis.

 

***

 

Key scenes in the movie WESTERN APPROACHES

were filmed on location at Holyhead,

Anglesey, in its deep breakwater harbour.

Wartime technicolor propaganda,

all parts played by non-professional actors,

some from the Royal most from the Merchant Navy,

the film is a thriller, and a work of

technical genius, and humanity,

where even the bad guys seem human.

 

The crowds that had gathered to watch the antics

on the water – the repeated set-ups

and retakes on the lifeboat, and the cutters

with all of the movie gear and personnel –

after the first week or so dispersed

not seeing then, beyond the palaver,

Pat Jackson’s script and direction, Jack Cardiff’s

photographing of the sea’s infinite

shifts and depths, its blues shading into greens,

its empty horizons, the pathos

of the seamen’s careful acting, their

unspoken remembrance of the drowned:

art as memento mori, as orison…

‘Out of the deep have I called unto thee’…

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

SLAVERY’S DIVIDENDS

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2.2K views

The Duke of Wellington vowed he would never

travel by train again – and, while still alive,

kept his vow. (His corpse was conveyed in state

by rail from his house in Kent to London).

The official opening of the Liverpool-

Manchester railway ought to have been one

of unqualified celebration: the first

passenger train journey in the world hauled

by a steam locomotive; with VIPs

and a military band – albeit

seated on benches in open wagons,

except for the Duke, then Prime Minister,

and his party in a bespoke, covered carriage.

 

The dual track line had been built to convey –

more quickly than the horse drawn narrow boats

on the canals, or carts on the unmade roads –

the raw cotton unloaded at Liverpool

to Cottonopolis (i.e. Manchester)

and its satellite cotton mill towns

in south east Lancashire – and transport

the finished products back for export

to the growing British Empire’s colonies.

 

George Stephenson, who designed and built the line,

in order to show off the commercial

versatility of the dual track approach

on the day employed two engines – both of which

he had designed and built: the Northumbrian –

the Duke’s train, as it were – pulled rolling stock

from west to east; the Rocket east to west.

They met half way – at Parkside Station –

to take on water. There, the MP

for Liverpool, William Huskisson,

became the first railway fatality.

He fell on the north track, and the Rocket

crushed one of his legs. The Northumbrian,

pulling the first of its wagons – the one

the military band had been travelling in –

took the injured man to Eccles, where he died

in the vicarage. Meanwhile the bandsmen

began to march in step – or attempted to

given the sleepers and rubble

laid between them – back to Liverpool.

 

The much delayed train arrived in Manchester

in rain. A large crowd of mill workers,

remembering the Peterloo Massacre,

jeered loudly, and threw things. Wellington,

always a defensive general,

refused to alight. The train returned

to Liverpool – passing the still stumbling

and wet bandsmen – to a civic reception.

 

I first learned about Huskisson’s demise

in a history lesson in school – just the sort

of Goon Show/Pythonesque fact to appeal

to teenage boys. We did not learn about

how Stephenson was able to build the track

across Chat Moss, a peat bog, thousands

of years old and many metres deep,

a permanent way that operates now,

an engineering feat of genius,

a joyous testament to our large brains.

Nor did we learn that the whole business venture –

each spike, each bolt and nut, each foot of wrought iron

rail, and each of the many, expensive

courses at the celebratory banquet

in Liverpool’s town hall – had been funded

by the enslavement of Africans.

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
4 Comments
POETRY

TITANS

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

As I was taking ice cubes from the freezer

in what was a garage and now is a shed

for motley matters – warm with early spring –

I heard, behind me, a frantic, aggressive

buzzing, like a high-pitched rattle. A large

bumblebee near the roof was partly caught

in a web. A hefty house spider approached.

They disappeared into darkness. The rattling

ceased. The bee returned alone into the light

but was trammelled in the web – and I,

a minor god of winter, with hoar frost

in my beard, observing a war in heaven,

was helpless like a mortal bystander

as that grand creature flew to its death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

THE ADVANCE OF REASON

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.6K views

Francis Bacon – not the figurative Irish

painter, the almost incomparable

depictor of human unreason –

but the Elizabethan/Jacobean

English essayist, diplomat, lawyer,

philosopher and politician, who was,

according to Euro-centric legend,

not only the real author of Shakespeare’s

plays but also the last person to have read

every book that had ever been written –

went to Trinity College, Cambridge,

when he was 12, and left at 16

to join the diplomatic service.

While at Cambridge he concluded that,

though admirable in itself, Aristotle’s

approach was not fit for purpose since

it did not improve ‘the estate of man’.

 

Later he would write THE ADVANCEMENT

OF LEARNING, whose taxonomies would inform

The Enlightenment, and NOVUM ORGANUM,

in Latin, whose empiricism

would establish the scientific method.

 

In a parallel life he was an MP

in a number of constituencies,

took gifts from litigants while Lord Chancellor,

and campaigned tirelessly for the urgent

beheading of Mary Queen of Scots.

 

***

 

The title NOVUM ORGANUM alludes

to Aristotle’s ORGANUM, his work

on logic the youthful Bacon decried.

The engraved title page of Bacon’s book

shows a galleon in full sail surging

through the Pillars of Hercules – now the Straits

of Gibraltar – west of which, according to

Plato, Atlantis lay. The pillars

were inscribed with a sailors’ warning:

Non Plus Ultra – Nothing Further Beyond.

 

Meanwhile, however, in far Cathay,

medical practitioners still consult

regularly a book of herbal medicines

and their uses which was written in the late

Han dynasty more than a thousand years

before Francis Bacon put quill to parchment.

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

ACROSS THE VELDT

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K views

For Sizwe Vilakazi

 

Fearing electricity – only installed

in rural Kwazulu post-Apartheid –

would disturb and thus devalue their cattle

the village elders decided it should come

no closer than the main road to Bergville,

a mile or so from their scattered houses.

 

Though the night sky, with its myriads

and myriads of stars, stayed above

the ancestors’ houses unpolluted,

in time there were fewer cattle, fewer folk.

Young people still left for the townships.

 

***

 

On our last morning, the family’s

little girl and her younger brother took us

across the veldt to their uncle’s kraal

to see newly born twin calves. The children,

on the dirt path through high dry grasses,

moved like silence, but we, clumsy townies,

raised a flock of plovers. The spindly calves

were suckling, and watched us with startled,

curious eyes, their mother impassive.

 

***

 

As we drove north on the Bergville road

to join the N3 we passed a primary school

with a Coca Cola sponsored sign,

and slowly over the Drakensberg mountains

winter’s first clouds appeared.

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

A CHANCE FOR KINDNESS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.9K views

When I was a student I seemed rather prone

to being accosted by panhandlers –

which conflicted me. Was I being kind,

or conned? I remember one incident

particularly – at Liverpool’s Pier Head –

that was an impromptu lesson about

the British Empire’s maritime past.

I had disembarked from the Woodside Ferry

and was crossing the cobbles to the bus

for the Student’s Union on Brownlow Hill

to join some friends for an evening of Guinness

when a man, old enough to be my father,

stopped me politely. He was wearing a tie,

but ill-matched jacket and trousers. He explained

that he was a Lascar from Chennai;

showed me his Merchant Navy passbook

with lists of ships he had sailed on, and ports

he had travelled to; showed me the long, deep scar

livid on his right leg, that had stranded him

at the city’s Merchant Seamen’s Mission;

and that I had a very, very kind face.

I cannot remember how much I gave him.

It took me many years to realise

that to be kind is to be privileged.

 

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments