POETRY

POETRY

SPEAKING OF STONES

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments2 min read2.8K views

‘For Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation: they shall drive out Ashdod at the noon day, and Ekron shall be rooted up.’ ZEPHANIAH 2.4

‘Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”’ INVISIBLE CITIES, Italo Calvini

 

When they were shown the abandoned houses,

with the half-eaten food on the table,

and the children’s toys scattered as if in haste,

the upended chair, broken glass, blood smeared,

they immediately remembered their parents’ tales

of what it was like at times in the old country,

and then, it seems, immediately forgot.

 

***

 

After many, many decades he returned,

to his village in the forest, expecting

to find all the houses razed, and the ruins

blackened with fire, instead they seemed pristine,

and each of them inhabited, including

his family’s. When he explained haltingly

to a passer-by – the language returning

the more he spoke – who he was, and why

he had returned, the villager went quickly

from house to house, rousing the inhabitants.

They chased him into the forest, throwing clods,

shouting abuse he remembered so well.

 

***

 

She pretended to be a stranger, strolling

past the gates to the courtyard of the house,

studying a tourist map. The wrought iron gates

had had metal sheets welded to them

to hide the courtyard – and the bougainvillea

had been ripped from the top of the high wall

and replaced with razor wire. There was CCTV

at each vantage point of the property.

A little girl suddenly appeared

at a window on the third floor, where

the bedrooms used to be, and waved. She waved back,

and whispered, “You are standing where I once stood”.

 

***

 

The apartment block next to the beach road

is only partially collapsed. Perhaps

the next bombardment will finish the job.

Its leaning white walls and glassless windows

are like a dystopian cenotaph.

A flat-bed cart – its many passengers

huddled as if in rain – passes, pulled

by a blinkered donkey. The Phoenician sea

breaks on the crowded beach. The sand between

the road and the water line is covered

by a disparate community

of trampled plastic tents.

 

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POETRY

THE GLASS OCARINA

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

Long before the fall of the House of Habsburg,

there were certain reports from all parts

of the Empire, from Dubrovnik

to Linz, from Bratislava to Trieste,

that became so frequent, were so consistent

the Emperor had to be informed.

The usual stories of naked, dancing

alchemists in Sarajevo or Yiddish

speaking brown bears playing klezmer in Prague

could be ignored, but he needed to know

that so many of his subjects were claiming

to be musical instruments made of glass –

grand pianos, even whole wind sections.

Chancellor Von Taaffe reported to him

in the privacy of the map-lined study

at the Hofburg. Franz Josef nodded, sighed,

and was silent. Eventually he spoke.

“Shall the concert be in Salzburg – or here

in Vienna?”‘, and smiled so that Von Taaffe

would know it had been a witz. The Chancellor

smiled too, bowed, then asked for instructions.

“Meisterliche Inaktivität!”

 

After the massacre in St Petersburg,

so close to Nicholas’ Winter Palace,

and the failed revolution that followed,

Franz Josef had a recurring nightmare.

It always opened with the frontier post

at the edge of the Hungarian steppe,

and always on the Jewish Sabbath.

Approaching on the white road from the east

would be a bear and its keeper – the latter

naked and dancing, the former calling out

to the guard: ‘”Shalom! Gutes shabbes! Ikh bin

a glaz okarina”.

 

 

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POETRY

KAFKA IN BERLIN

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

The tubercular Franz Kafka, escaping

the domestic confines of Prague, spent

most of the months before he died in Berlin

with his lover, Dora Diament.

 

Some of the time he studied the Talmud

in the free library of the long established

Higher Institute for Jewish Studies

with its eclectic and diverse collection

of more than fifty five thousand books.

 

The Weimar Republic’s ‘wild und wollig’

creative freedoms, he wrote, whirled about

outside the groves of academe, and inside

his head. For a long time he had admired –

from Mitteleuropa’s bourgeois distance –

the Hassidim for their pious excesses

in the shetls in the east, among

the unceasing forests the goyim owned,

a dybbuk behind every birch tree.

 

But among the Talmudic scrolls, he would dream

of the dry heat of Palestine; the rustle

of date palms; the sparse hills, and tinkling flocks

of goats and sheep; the valleys of infinite

groves of ancient olive trees, with their rough bark

and silvery leaves; of being well, and safe.

 

 

 

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POETRY

BONANZA

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.2K views

When the village – which is set in the foothills

of Mount Carmel, in the hinterland

between the coastal cities of Acer

and Haifa, and blessed with seven springs –

had been ethnically cleansed, its villagers

exiled or unaccounted for, its name changed,

it became an artists’ colony,

attracting painters, sculptors, musicians,

composers, poets, playwrights, novelists,

film makers from all over the nascent state.

The pristine forests of native pine, oak,

alder, laurel, it was surrounded by,

were replaced with stands of European trees.

The stone houses were refurbished or razed;

the school became an exhibition centre;

the mosque a café called ‘Bonanza’.

 

The original village was founded,

it is said, by one of Saladin’s

commanders. Its abundant harvests

of wheat, sesame, carob – sheltered

from the prevailing north westerly winds

by the surrounding woodland, watered

by the perpetual seven springs – were sold

for centuries in the ancient markets

of Haifa and Acer.

 

 

 

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POETRY

WINTERING IN VENICE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.6K views

The exiled Russian poet, Josef Brodsky,

winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,

whom the Soviet authorities

had forced to ’emigrate’ permanently,

taught at various colleges in the States,

and usually spent his Christmas/New Year

vacations in Venice, a city

that reminded him of his native

Leningrad – previously and now

St Petersburg. Tzar Peter the Great

had canalised the Ladoga marshes

to build a northern city emulating,

perhaps outdoing, La Serenissima.

 

The American poet, Ezra Pound –

self-exiled to Venice, claiming he feared

the electric chair if he had returned

after the war to the States – was buried

in the Protestant Cemetery

on the island of San Michele, along

with consuls and admirals, and, in time,

Brodsky himself, a descendant of revered

rabbis become a Christian convert.

 

One winter’s night, Brodsky, with his then lover,

the American Jewish polymath

Susan Sontag – who, years later, would stage

‘Waiting for Godot’ in a candle-lit

theatre in besieged Sarajevo –

visited Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound’s widow,

in her apartment near La Salute,

a church built as a votive offering

for the city’s once more surviving the plague.

With Gaudier-Brzeka’s hieratic

bust of the poet standing a yard tall

in a far corner of the room, they listened,

for two hours, as patiently as they

were able, to the widow’s rehearsed defence

of her late husband – “He had a Jewish name…

and Jewish friends…” – declined more tea, and left.

 

A few years after this encounter Brodsky

had open heart surgery in New York,

and later, two bypass operations.

He remained a heavy smoker, and died,

aged 55, from a heart attack

in his Brooklyn Height’s apartment.

The coffin was flown in the cargo-hold to Venice –

‘A drowning city, where suddenly the dry

light of reason dissolves in the moisture

of the eye’ – and, from Marco Polo airport,

taken by water-hearse to San Michele.

 

Homesick for his family and city

this unselfpitying, bilingual

genius in his writings about Venice,

poetry and prose, frequently mentions

the wintry fogs that rise on the lagoon,

and drift along the canals, and soften

the pillars of arcades, and baffle

the echoing sounds of distant footfalls…

…’A tin can launched skyward

with the tip of a shoe goes sailing

out of sight, and a minute later

there is still no sound of it falling on

wet sand. Or, for that matter, a splash’.

 

 

Note: see also EZRA POUND IN VENICE.

 

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POETRY

A SENTIENT PLACE

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.4K views

This day marks fifty years since we came to live

in this square, detached, and spacious house, built

to a design from a Georgian pattern book

one hundred and eighty two years ago –

when the First Opium War ended, the First

Afghan War began, and the Mines Act

prohibited women, and girls, and boys

under 10 from working underground.

 

***

 

We moved in on a Valentine’s Day, the day

Solzhenitsyn began his enforced exile,

the Soviet Union like the Roman

Empire, and, indeed, Jehovah himself,

considering banishment from paradise

as the most exquisite of punishments.

 

***

 

We celebrated the move into this

domestic, suburban arcadia

by collecting a Chinese takeaway

from round the corner, and sharing it

with two close friends – one now long dead, the other

utterly lost to forgetfulness.

 

***

 

Dawn lights the birch tree through the eastern windows.

On the sedum in the small, railed garden

at the front sun sets. For two generations

lives in all their motley have found a way

to thrive beneath the roof’s adamantine slates,

among aspidistras and peace lilies,

among books, prints, paintings, among ceramics

and furniture, among music and voices,

the memorabilia of our lifetimes.

 

***

 

This is a sentient place, filled with

the light touch of fond spirits, indifferent

to the noisy dust of empires falling.

 

 

 

 

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