POETRY

POETRY

ON PARYS MOUNTAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read562 views

One day, back when a mobile phone was the size

of a small brick and ‘google’ was not even

a silly word, back when I was still working

for the county council, and you were

part time at the university,

when my work seemed to have come to comprise

persuading folk to work together

when they did not want to, I took a day’s leave

to enjoy your love and sanity. ‘Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!’

 

We crossed the Menai Straits to Ynys Môn.

We were heading for Cemaes Bay on the island’s

north coast. For some reason I suggested

we made a detour to Parys Mountain –

actually a hill – the sign for which

we had often passed. We parked, followed the path,

and were suddenly above and among

the open cast mine where copper ore

had been extracted from the early Bronze Age

to 1940 – for ornaments

and armour, plumbing and coinage.

 

Apart from the sparse purples of heather

and the scarce pinks of rose bay willow herb,

the colours were blacks, browns, ochres, greys,

whites, oranges, yellows – and the earth

rock bare as moonscape. You reminded me

that some locations for episodes

of Dr Who had been filmed there.

 

We could see the remains of the railway

built to carry ore down to nearby Amlwch:

a fishing village that became a port

and an affluent town – the Copper Kingdom

of the World – and was now impoverished.

 

We drove home, reflecting on humankind’s

unending industry, and the spoils

of our perseverance.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

LADY NOVELIST SEA-BATHING

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read791 views

Dressed in her scarlet one piece swimsuit, using

her new off-road walker with a seat

and pneumatic tyres, she crosses the narrow road

between her row of converted cottages

and the concrete slipway, bumps slowly

over the stony beach – where each fragment

has a tale to tell of times and tides, of

snowfall and sunshine – and into high water

up to her waist. She turns the walker,

and sits, seemingly contemplating

the horizon she once would swim towards.

 

Holidaymakers visit her Dorset cove

rarely, and then only by accident

there being no public toilets or even

a coffee shack. Those who do are unaware

that the scarlet woman sitting in the sea

is the heiress of Austen, Eliot, Pym –

mistresses of comedies of manners,

and occasional passing tragedies,

always humane, ironic, redemptive.

 

She likes to imagine that when she looks

south there is no one between her and

the Antarctic other than chance mariners.

She feels she should begin to plan her next,

and probably last, novel. However,

the world she has always written about

was essentially orderly – the

comedy and pathos of her work

the exception that tests the rule as it were.

The world seems inherently dystopian

now  – more Salem than Salop, so to speak,

a havoc of witchfinder generals

pulsing with cruelty and righteousness.

Places that offered a prospect of peace

have become prone to annihilation

from fire, from flood, from drought, from famine.

Elsewhere there is torture and bombardment,

the immolation of generations.

 

She is tempted to emulate Dean Swift

and the ‘saeva indignatio’

of his self-written epitaph, and

excoriate humankind. The title

she has in mind is DIGITUS

IMPUDICUS – and the cover a

middle finger gesturing at readers.

But maybe humanity like the Gulf Stream

will last a little longer. So perhaps

the main character should be a refugee,

a widow with three children, set adrift somewhere,

and the title ALL THE WORLD’S A WAGER?

 

She suddenly realises that the tide is out,

and panics momentarily, stranded

among the silent stones.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

REASONS TO LAMENT

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read434 views

For David Alexander

 

‘Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?’

LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING William Wordsworth

 

An old friend lives in a village recorded

in the Domesday Book. Thirty miles due north

is RAF Fairford. The stones of his house

reverberate at night from the roar

of cataclysmic Stealth Bombers, darts

of death to destroy with fire and ruin

the land of Ferdowsi, Rumi, Hafez.

 

Monmouth’s rebels were cut down in Cheevers

aka Bloody Lane on the village’s

northern edge, and Hanging Judge Jeffries

meted out the sentences of death

to their survivors at the temporary

assizes held in the village’s

mediaeval tavern – once a hostelry

for a Carthusian priory, a place

of solitude, silence, and self-restraint.

 

 

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POETRY

HISTORY RHYMING

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read723 views

The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years,

was always really only about oil.

Iraq had its Arab allies, the US,

and the USSR supplying cash,

know-how, arms. The war was a reprise

of the Western Front, with trenches and

chemical weapons. Machine guns scythed

line after line after line of young men.

A city was wrecked, a refinery,

many more than a million wounded and dead,

but no reparations were sought or given,

nor any territory exchanged –

a defensive war that accidentally

bigged-up a Cleric, and the hegemony

of zealotry and blood; an aggressive war

meant to big-up the hegemony

of the American Empire, but,

instead, made a Tyrant think he was

an ally not a useful idiot

with a regime of blood and torture.

 

The following two so-called Gulf Wars

were also about oil – as well, of course,

as caprice, rhetoric, spite and racism –

as is the current one. So, perhaps, at last,

Pax Americana will properly

be rendered as Clades Americana –

where ‘clades’, according to Google Translate,

may be translated as: ‘calamity’,

‘damage’, ‘defeat’, ‘discomfiture’, ‘disaster’,

‘loss’, ‘mutilation’, ‘overthrow’, ‘rout’, ‘ruin’,

‘scourge’, according to context, of course  – think

Afghanistan, Vietnam.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SIX VARIATIONS ON A THEME

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read623 views

The torturers go home for supper,

and look quietly in on their children sleeping.

The torturers’ boss is still at work

in his well-lit, air conditioned office.

A master of capital letters

and clichés, he is drafting a speech.

He will mention Liberty and Peace,

in addition to Duty, Freedom and God.

 

***

 

There is no price tag on Liberty and Peace.

More than a hundred little girls, in perhaps

less than half a minute, were murdered

by two cruise missiles, each one of which

will have cost many times more to build

than the school in which the children were slaughtered.

 

***

 

To reach the border and the famed lakes beyond

tourists must drive through forests of dense pine

and oak and beech, past red ringed signs warning

of wild boars and bears, and finally

through a ruined village – at one end

a burnt out mosque, the other a church.

 

***

 

A shepherd watching his flock on scrubland

his family have owned for generations

is shot to death by a young man of his own age

whose great grandparents were gassed to death.

‘Vengeance is mine!’ declares the shared god.

 

***

 

A consultant to arms manufacturers –

dutifully inspired undoubtedly

by the man with the rictus grin, gleaming teeth,

dead eyes, and money in many banks,

who always assumes that  someone else’s

relative and loved one will die for him –

the retired general with the port wine face,

speaking to camera in his book-lined study,

tells us that much, much less must be spent

on the poor, the elderly, the disabled,

in short, the vulnerable so that we will have

enough guns for when the Russians come

in five years’ time. In the studio

the presenter and the panel of experts nod

sagely, and ask for no evidence.

Meanwhile, each month on the Ukrainian steppe

and in its forests a small town’s worth

of Russian soldiers die like their ancestors.

 

***

 

And this might be the way the world ends,

not with the Four Horsemen or the Rapture, but

with TV networks fixing cameras

at certain locations to live stream

whatever may occur and whenever –

currently, places like the ruins

of Gaza City, the more or less intact

southern suburbs of Beirut, Tel Aviv’s

presently pristine city centre,

and an oil terminal in the Persian Gulf –

in readiness for Armageddon.

 

 

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POETRY

THE A WORD: THE FEAR THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read609 views

Logophobia is, of course, merely one

of many morbid dreads but the fear of words

or, rather, one in particular

seems like an epidemic currently

in the chancelleries and newsrooms

of the Global North, rendering the patients,

at best, silent, about the destruction

of two nations – one from without, one

from within, one becoming a pariah,

and receiver of bushels of stolen wheat,

one an object of universal pity,

where some are starving, plagued by rats and fleas

–  and, at worst, being actively complicit

in self-righteous exceptionalism,

in extravagant conspiracies,

in multiple crimes against humanity.

 

Unlike the H word, for example,

‘Hypocritical’, or the M word,

‘Mendacious’, or even the I word

‘Islamaphobic’, or the U word

‘UnChristian’, it is the modern version

of the public shame of being branded

with a scarlet letter A, the new version

of the career-ending terror of being

labelled a Commie, the fear of being called

‘Antisemitic’.

 

 

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