POETRY

POETRY

ARMADA

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2K views

‘Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.’ Inaugural Address, University of St Andrews, John Stuart Mill, 1867

 

After the Toxteth Riots when Liverpool’s

black community fought back against

the systemic racism of the police

the UK government invested money

in regenerating parts of the city

including the disused Victorian docks.

 

The Albert Dock includes an art gallery,

two museums, eateries, gift shops,

and apartments overlooking the Mersey,

the King’s Dock hotels and entertainment/

exhibition/conference venues. Except

for a taxi from Lime Street Station,

one might stay in Liverpool and avoid

the city centre not just impoverished

areas like Chinatown or St James.

The Labour Party’s apparatchiks chose

to hold this year’s annual conference

in the Albert and King’s Dock complex,

and had carefully planned master classes

in the crafts and arts of fence sitting.

The first day was Sunday, October 8th –

oblivious still of the horrors

of Black Saturday, and its challenges.

 

We were visiting Tate Liverpool,

the gallery in the Albert Dock, and sat

at one of its café’s alfresco tables

in the arcades. Through the passing delegates –

lobbyists in suits, young activists,

weathered politicos, corporate journos –

we could see the glow of the setting sun

on the walls of the Slavery Museum.

 

One of the exhibitions we had seen

was Hew Locke’s installation ‘Armada’,

comprising forty five miniature vessels,

hung at shoulder height from the ceiling:

fishing smacks, container ships, galleons,

rafts, caravels, sampans, schooners, dhows.

There were no slavers there, or prison ships.

Those were votive boats to save our hearts and souls;

laden, armed with expectation, hope, and, yes,

fear; a flotilla of ethical choices;

the enemies of indifference.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

OCTOBER MOON

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

That Friday night, a slow moon rose, blood-orange,

huge, over the sea’s horizon. Trails of clouds

were silhouetted across its deserts

like black smoke. Next morning, a drear sea-light

filled the rented cottage in the dunes

by the shore. A heron was wading slowly,

purposefully along the water’s edge.

 

He had gone to that tiny, remote island

off the Atlantic coast, accessible

at low tide across a sand bar, to finish

his latest book: ‘Looking The Other Way –

Genocide In Rwanda’. He was working

on the index. He had reached Complicity.

 

Prompted by a text from a friend late

on Sunday he turned on the tv news –

saw pictures of that Saturday’s massacre:

edited images of the aftermath

of the murder of innocence, and real-time,

incriminating footage of armed men

oppressing distraught women and children,

taking hostages for ransom or slaughter.

 

The days then weeks that followed were lit

by the graphics of the after effects

of the bombardment, the deliberately

chosen response – a life for a life,

a death for a death, rubble for rubble.

And gaslit by hours of talking heads

oozing bombast, lies, and casuistry.

It was a time too illuminated

by the courage and humanity

of the living victims of loss and horror.

 

Each day he would walk along the shore

round the island until he could see

the range of mountains inland across the fields.

The peaks were increasingly hidden in shifting mists.

The hedgerows of hawthorn and traveller’s joy

edging the fields were turning to yellow.

He would think of the fire-bombing of Dresden,

of the razing of Lidice, of Stalingrad –

and of Goya’s painting of two giants

clubbing themselves to death as they sink

ever further into a bog, like some

danse macabre of self-destruction.

One day he suddenly thought of the books

in his study at home, a collection

of sixty years, and was overwhelmed

by their number, their seeming irrelevance.

 

He watched the progress of the moon as the month

waxed and waned: sometimes obfuscated

by clouds, or smoke, or dust; sometimes bright as

a ‘bomber’s moon’. The stars appeared. The sun rose

above the horizon. The sea ebbed, flowed.

And thousands, thousands of children were slaughtered.

 

 

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POETRY

BACKSTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

Ella Yeivin was taught to play the piano

by her mother in pre-war Poland.

Her parents were musicians in what was then

Lvov, previously Lemberg, now Lviv.

They were active in the Jewish Labour Bund.

 

Ella survived Auschwitz. They did not.

She never spoke of it. Still in her teens,

in a DP camp in Schauenstein,

she organised a children’s choir.

They would sing in their many languages.

When her US visa came she was

reluctant to leave her little singers.

 

She lived first in the Bronx, with the family

of a distant cousin of her father.

She looked after the children, and began

to teach piano. With the reparations

she was able to buy a top floor apartment

with an upright in Brooklyn Heights,

long before it became fashionable.

She was a good teacher. Her young students,

and even their mothers, never complained

about the six floors they had to walk up.

 

She would sometimes think of their apartment

on Ruska Street in Lvov – always

imagining it sunlit and empty.

She never married. Briefly each day

she watched pedestrians on the wide walkway

crossing Brooklyn Bridge. She saw the Twin Towers

rising in Lower Manhattan – and lived

long enough to see them fall.

 

 

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POETRY

THERE IS AN EDGE BIG CITIES HAVE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.2K views

For Mary Clark

 

There is an edge big cities have. I sense it

even in this airless ground floor hotel room

with its net-curtained windows that are locked

‘For your Safety and Peace of Mind’. Outside,

on the pavement below the window

is a beggar, cross-legged. He and the street

furniture are the only still things

in the broad avenue of six-lane traffic

and seemingly innumerable

and unstoppable humans of all ages,

conditions, ethnicities, and genders.

When I lie on the bed I can hear beneath me

the timetabled and metallic rhythms

of the metro; imagine the carriage lights

flickering on the tunnel walls; the strangers’

faces, alert, circumspect, preoccupied.

 

A week ago, I passed a school of dance.

Through the open skylights I could hear

the rehearsal piano, and the soft fall

of nubile ballet shoes on a sprung floor.

Returning to my hotel, I wandered

through a street market, and watched two young men,

with up-country accents, who were selling –

from the back of a horse box, unmarked

except for spatters of drying yellow mud –

a large stuffed black bear and a penny whistle.

 

Yesterday, among residential streets built

when empires were official, and the clerks

who kept their ledgers rented houses here,

I came by chance to one where an exiled

poet had lived and died. Trying to reach

the border with her small son, pursued

by armed frontier guards through a forest,

he had been shot, and bled to death in her arms.

I remembered lines from the only poem

she had published about this city:

 

…a place, for me, of possibilities

and fear. I cannot imagine its borders.

I cannot walk home. There is an absence,

a melancholy, a wistfulness,

a nostalgia: as if I had just missed

something special – a window unobtrusively

made fast, a door easing shut; someone’s

library glimpsed from a passing bus;

the surprise of a marble statue

of a child behind a neglected park’s

locked gates; above abandoned warehouses

and wharves, an unwarranted sunrise.

 

 

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POETRY

MANHATTAN PSYCHO

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2.1K views

When we stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel –

mid-town on Madison and 45th –

in the ’90s we guessed it was much

as it had been when it first opened

in the ’20s, apart from the peeling

décor and service from central casting.

It was popular with South Americans,

whom, it was rumoured, were stingy with tips

so the Yellow Cabs by-passed the entrance.

In the Gents off the lobby I heard

the fabled Manhattan rhetorical

question: ‘Did somebody die in here?’

 

When the lights at 45th and Madison

showed red a young man on roller blades

produced a gizmo and turned them green.

On Madison Avenue – that highway

of catchphrase and hyperbole – we passed

one man saying to another about

a third: ‘He’s not got a pot to piss in!’

 

The windows were single-glazed so we woke,

on our first night, at four, hearing what we thought

were revellers in the street. Through the rear

of Grand Central Station kitchen staff

and cleaners – multi-lingual commuters –

were arriving from Queens and Spanish Harlem.

 

We breakfasted in the Gobi Deli,

now gone, round the corner on Vanderbilt.

The walls were postered with large, explicit

diagrams of the Heimlich manoeuvre –

as if choking were part of the menu.

 

We had seen no one on our corridor

throughout our three night stay. When we checked out

the door of the room opposite was open.

The plaster on all of the walls had been gouged,

hacked as if with an axe.

 

 

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POETRY

EMPIRE STATE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

Before the viewing galleries were encased

in bullet-proof glass from ceiling to floor

there was wire mesh – with interstices

big enough through which to aim a lens,

and for Manhattan’s airs to freely pass.

Wannabe jumpers were deterred and jokers

keen to fly a kite above Fifth Avenue.

 

Late one sunny October afternoon,

when the leaves had begun to turn, we saw,

as felons might in an exercise yard,

the islands – Roosevelt, Staten, Liberty,

Ellis, and Manhattan itself – reduced,

and the sun begin to set over Jersey,

Ohio, the imperial geometry

of the states, a sentient jigsaw –

and imagined, as prisoners might,

autumnal prairie grass in Kansas,

eagles above the snow-line in the Rockies,

neon-lit diners on Sunset Boulevard.

 

 

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