POETRY

POETRY

GUBBIO

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

These ancient hill towns were built for defence.

Old houses in this one have two entrances

side by side: one wide for friends, one narrow

for foes – la porta dei morti.

 

A platoon of the retreating Wehrmacht

stopped here to murder forty partisans

at the bottom of the town by the high road,

in the square where the tourist buses turn –

Piazza dei Martiri Quaranti.

 

Though this is Umbria and February

is mild, wood smoke seasoning the windless air,

the cold in the Duomo is wintry still,

its paving chilling the bones of our feet.

Hanging above the ornate stone altar

is a wood carving of Christ crucified.

We emerge into brightness, and imagine,

in the eastern haze, the Adriatic.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MEDITATIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read2.6K views

‘The Third Man…a revelation…’

Martin Scorsese, THE INDEPENDENT, 2015

 

There is no mention in Graham Greene’s novella

The Third Man, or in his screenplay, or even

the shooting script, of Café Marc Aurel –

to which, in the movie, Joseph Cotten

aka Holly Martins, writer of Westerns,

has lured his friend Orson Welles aka

Harry Lime, racketeer, only to be

thwarted by Allida Valli aka

Anna Schimdt, actress at the Josefstadt

Theater, and Harry Lime’s faithful lover.

 

***

 

On a rainy day trip to old Vienna,

knowing the Café did not exist

and never did, we were determined

to see the extant Weiner Riesenrad,

from whose brief circular zenith Orson Welles

meditated on the human condition,

democracy, and Swiss-made cuckoo clocks.

 

So who better to ask for directions

among the shopping crowds on Kaernterstrasse

than two young men in smart-casual attire

manning a stall promoting the Marcus

Aurelius Foundation, whose mission is

‘to support young people to live a life of

clarity and purpose’ through Stoicism.

Where else than the city of Freud and Mahler

to learn how to live with the fear of death!

 

***

 

Marcus Aurelius – sixteenth Emperor

of Rome and last of the Pax Romana –

is most famous now for his Meditations,

a collection of his stoical

aphorisms, two of which are as follows:

‘We love ourselves more than other people,

yet care more about their opinion

than our own…’ – and ‘If it is not right do not

do it; if it is not true do not say it…’

 

The Emperor while campaigning against

the Germanic Tribes died, allegedly,

in Vindobona, present day Vienna.

Some say he had just inscribed

the following: ‘Act as if every

action is the last action of your life’.

 

***

 

The Café’s name is secure in black and white

celluloid above a shop front

in a partially bombed square

just round the corner from Marc-Aurel-Strasse:

the interior lit from a distance

to look like a café – though the action

was filmed at Elstree Studios, Borehamwood,

London. The film unit on the spot

must have decided the place needed a name

so perhaps Greene, the ever ironic

Balliol history graduate, suggested

Marcus Aurelius – and Carol Reed,

the director, chose the shortened version

to fit. Did Greene mention that the emperor

most probably died somewhere else,

namely Sirmium, one of the oldest

cities in Europe, and birthplace of ten

Roman emperors, now present day

Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia?

Both Harry and Marcus elusive in death?

 

***

 

The Emperor was cremated and deified.

In Rome’s Piazza Colonna – off

the Via Del Corso, where the Jews

were paraded and mocked each Mardi Gras –

is a column commemorating

the Emperor’s victories in battle

(though not, of course, his Meditations),

probably begun in his lifetime.

When Christianity prevailed his statue

topping it was replaced by one of St Paul

aka Saul of Tarsus, Anatolia –

now present day Turkey – the city

where Mark Antony first met Cleopatra.

 

***

 

In the movie, whose constant backdrop

are the literal ruins of bombed Vienna,

with the four Occupying Powers – Britain,

France, Russia, and the USA – playing

a key role in the story as both

dei and diaboli ex machina,

nobody ever asks where the Jews have gone.

 

 

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POETRY

SPEAKING OF STONES

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments2 min read3.1K 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 read1.7K 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 read2K 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 read2.3K 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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