POETRY

POETRY

THE WAR ON TERROR

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2K views

The adult life of Goyahkla, aka

Geronimo – the famous Apache

spiritual and military leader –

may be divided into three parts:

combating the Mexican invasion

of his people’s homeland – now north east

Mexico and south west USA;

combating the American invasion

of the territory; managing

his twenty years or so of enforced exile

in Alabama, Florida and finally

Oklahoma. His soubriquet, it is said,

resulted from fearful Mexican soldiers

calling upon San Geronimo.

 

He was much photographed, and charged a fee

when he was in exile – as he did

for the events to which he was invited,

like President Teddy Roosevelt’s

inaugural parade. One photograph

was taken just before his surrender

after decades of guerrilla warfare.

Geronimo, and four of his ‘braves’

are standing foursquare before a landscape

of Arizona shrubland. They are holding

carbines the US Cavalry used,

he an infantryman’s long rifle.

 

***

 

After 9/11 the US Congress

passed the Patriots’ Act, setting up

Homeland Security to prevent

future attacks. Osama Bin Laden

acquired the code name Geronimo,

which, given the latter’s long struggle

to prevent the piecemeal genocide

of his people, and the ethnic cleansing

of their lands, where they had lived for at least

a thousand years, was curiously Freudian.

 

***

 

My favourite tee-shirt was manufactured

in Honduras  – one of the poorest countries

in the Western Hemisphere – for Port

& Company, who have a declared

responsible sourcing policy, and are

based in Wilmington, North Carolina,

a Confederate port in the Civil War.

The photograph of Geronimo

and his warriors has been reproduced

on the front of the tee-shirt – between

‘HOMELAND SECURITY’ and ‘FIGHTING

TERRORISM SINCE 1492’. So,

while I am swaddled in the ironies of

white supremacy and capitalism,

I may enjoy the brief but life affirming

humour of the gallows.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE SKELETON ARMY OF STEVEN STREET

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2.2K views

Each Sunday the Salvationists would gather

at St Giles Cemetery – once the site

of a medieval leper hospital

set well beyond Chester’s city limits.

To the thud of the bass drum, to chords of brass,

to banners declaiming ‘Be just, and fear not!’,

to the singing of ‘A friend of Jesus,

O what bliss!’, uniformed they would march

onwards to a ‘Stronghold of Satan’ –

past the spot where, high above the river,

a Protestant and a Catholic

were burned to death a century apart.

 

Beside the canal, near the abattoir,

steam mill and lead works, was a purpose-built

enclave of constricted streets of back-to-back

lodging houses, public houses, gin shops.

Steven Street – perhaps three yards across

and fifty long – was the centre of the slum,

and home to hundreds of Irish Catholics

who were refugees from the Great Hunger.

 

The Salvation Army would march past the cramped,

noisome ghetto along the canal path

to ‘O boundless salvation!’. One Sunday, ‘Black

Sunday’, an ecumenical group

of English and Irish, Catholics

and non-Catholics – probably outrageously

drunk, as well as outrageously poor –

waited for the parade to pass by

the canal end of Steven Street, then followed

the last rank – mocking the hymns, hurling abuse,

dead rats, stones, and unfurling a raggedy

banner with a scrawled skull and crossbones.

Some Salvationists were seriously

assaulted, needing medical attention –

but the magistracy, concerned for Chester’s

tourist trade, considered the Sally Army

provocative, so bound over

the Steven Street ‘generals’ to keep the peace,

despite green-ink letters to the local press

railing against Fenians and Popery.

 

That year the British sent forty thousand troops

to land at Alexandria and invade

the Suez Canal Zone, the canal itself

being supposedly under threat. Steven Street –

or, rather, its straitened dwellings – was demolished

when I was a young man, and replaced with a block

of social housing. About twenty feet

of narrow road way, barely a car’s width,

remains – but not much else has changed: lives crippled

by accident, and the self-interest

of others; lives abridged by class, and want,

and bigotry; whole nations hoodwinked

by wonders and marvels, by abstractions;

consumed, diminished by avarice.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE ISLE OF PORTLAND

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2.1K views

The Bibby Stockholm – an accommodation

barge containing asylum seekers – is moored

in Portland harbour, from where quarried limestone,

laid down in the Late Jurassic period,

has been shipped for many centuries.

 

‘The star-filled seas are smooth to-night

From France to England strown;

Black towers above the Portland light

The felon-quarried stone.’

 

Not unreasonably it was assumed,

on social media, where he was named,

that the man who was heard screaming on the barge

at 3.00 a.m. was the one who later

committed suicide. It was, in fact,

someone else’s wretched, anguished son.

 

‘On yonder island, not to rise,

Never to stir forth free,

Far from his folk a dead lad lies

That once was friends with me.’

 

Text book neo-liberal economic

theory is operating here: the market

decides who may be given a chance to live.

To escape from havoc and torture,

to cross continents and shipping lanes,

requires some money, desperation, and courage.

 

‘Lie you easy, dream you light,

And sleep you fast for aye;

And luckier may you find the night

Than ever you found the day.’

 

Renowned for being both durable

and workable by masons, Portland stone

was used in building St Pauls Cathedral

in London, and the United Nations

in Manhattan, for example. If God

were to exist he or she would have to be

totally impervious to irony.

 

Note: the quoted verses in italics are the three quatrains that comprise A.E. Housman’s THE ISLE OF PORTLAND, number LIX in his A SHROPSHIRE LAD sequence.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE HAZARD OF FAILURE

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

‘I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above…’

AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH, W.B. Yeats

 

For David Press

 

One of the pitman painters from Ashington,

Jimmy Floyd, explained that he had depicted

the shed in a painting green like the grass

because he had run out of yellow

the intended colour. Better the wrong shade

than an allotment without a shed.

 

***

 

According to Gertrude Stein, that mistress

of ironies, the real and only reason

for Picasso’s Blue Period was

he had a lot of blue paint left over –

though the barefoot trio in the ‘Tragedy’

on that chill shore would be wretched and hopeless

in any colour from the spectrum: a man,

a woman, a child, the little boy

touching his father with one hand, the other

stretched towards his mother, who stands head bowed,

a little apart, watched helplessly by the man.

 

***

 

The poet, Refaat Alareer,

who was killed in an Israeli air strike,

foresaw his death. His last poem begins:

‘If I must die’. He says that after his death

‘you must live/to tell my story/to sell

my things/to buy a piece of cloth/and some strings’

and make a white kite ‘with a long tail’

so that a fatherless child in Gaza –

‘awaiting his dad who left in a blaze’ –

might look up, and momentarily

imagine ‘an angel is there’.

 

 

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POETRY

WILD GEESE ABOVE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.5K views

I am standing at the kitchen sink stuffing

chicken thighs with sage and wrapping them

in prosciutto crudo, and am thinking

how much cooking and making poems

are analogous when I hear wild geese.

 

From the patio I see perhaps

half a dozen skeins, like strings of molecules,

flying towards the sunset, calling, calling.

They can see the shine of the marshes

they are homing to, and, if they knew it,

the darkening bulk of Halkyn Mountain

and, beyond, the pink-grey shimmering

of the Irish Sea. Suddenly, as evening

shades into night, blackbirds – territorial

as any gentry – in the birch tree,

and the plum, set up their warning rattle

at a neighbour’s cat, white as a cloud,

prowling behind the rhododendron.

 

I return to the kitchen, reflecting

on alarms and valedictions in

darkling gardens and still-bright skies – the sounds

a poem makes – and turn the oven on.

 

 

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POETRY

SAND FLATS AT WEST KIRBY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.4K views

At low water the sand flats stretch unbroken

down the Dee estuary’s English coast

to the reed beds of Parkgate and Burton Marsh;

stretch beyond the islands in the river’s mouth –

Hilbre, Middle Eye and Little Eye –

towards the wind turbines in Liverpool Bay;

then along the head of the Peninsula,

past Meols, Leasowe, Wallasey and New Brighton,

to join the mudflats of the Mersey.

 

At low water the sand flats are safe to cross

to the islands – and you might feel you could walk

to that wind farm on Burbo Bank, or walk

to Wales and reach Snowdonia’s ranges,

despite the channels you cannot see,

and the waves encroaching which you cannot hear,

let alone see, because of the constant sound

of endless, restless, distant waters.

 

Here are such large skies of shifting clouds,

long veils of rain, unbroken sunlight –

such immense firmaments. This is a place

of horizons and mirage, of disquiet,

and exhilaration, like a lost element,

a lost dimension, as if you might glimpse

heaven or angels, or whatever else

may be at the world’s edge.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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