POETRY

POETRY

IN THE BEGINNING

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read427 views

On the first day of summer she asked the novice

to open the scriptorium’s small casement.

And suddenly the river’s murmurings

became clear, and she could hear curlews

calling from the narrow estuary,

and thought of her family in the village

beyond the river through the woodland

two furlongs away. Then remembered

how nostalgia is a neighbour to regret.

She turned to the sheets of calfskin vellum

pristine on the desk before her, touched them,

smelt the animal scent on her finger tips.

She ruled lines across the first page of parchment,

chose a quill the novice had sharpened,

a pot of black ink they had made from soot,

and began: ‘in principio creavit

Deus caelum et terram…’ When she came

to God’s name she put the quill down and looked up

to ask the novice to fetch the brass-bound box

that held the lapis lazuli and gold leaf.

She saw the girl had not been watching her

attentively as she usually did –

intending always to learn and learn,

as she had herself when a novice – but was pale

and bent over, and realised that Eve’s Curse

was suddenly upon her. ‘Sister,’

she said gently, ‘you will be a bride of Christ.

Go and sit by the window, and pray’.

As she watched her go she thought again

of her own noviciate, and of her nieces

and nephews in the village over the wall

beyond the river – and admonished herself.

The novice, turning, called to her, ‘Please come,

sister’. ‘What is it, child?’ she asked. ‘Sister, please’.

Beneath the casement were the abbey orchards,

a kaleidoscope of apple blossom. The summer air

brought the scent unbidden – and the sounds

of the river, and the distant cries of birds.

 

 

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POETRY

HARD LABOUR

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read600 views

An ex-colleague, about whom I have heard nothing

for thirty or forty years, has died

quite recently from prostate cancer

I have learned from a chance encounter

with Miranda, a mutual acquaintance.

Paul had been an able linguist, fluent

in French and German, a charismatic

teacher – and a very heavy drinker.

The last I had heard of him he had gone

to teach English in Isfahan, Iran –

presumably a cold turkey cure

in one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

When he died he was living in Alvor,

in the Algarve, under a pseudonym –

Sebastien Melmotte – Miranda told me,

though she could or would not tell me why

but, chuckling, reminisced about Paul’s

extensive repertoire of bad impressions.

 

Later, a search on the internet told me

that in the 1990s Paul had taught

at a prestigious private girls’ school

in Lagos, and had a large apartment

in the city centre. At his trial

it was alleged he lured street boys there

and prostituted them – which he denied

then, and subsequently. He was sentenced

to twelve years hard labour, and served two

in Kirikiri Prison near Lagos

before being pardoned by the President

and deported to the UK. For a time

he lived in his late mother’s house in Widnes,

which was opposite a primary school.

The local press and the BBC found out.

He was shouted at in the street, went out

only after dark – then disappeared one day.

 

I recalled Miranda’s parting remark.

‘I think, and so do others, that he was

unjustly treated’. Did she mean he was

innocent of the charges and/or

should not have been accosted in Widnes?

From memory, in the staffroom, the only

environment in which I knew him,

he seemed stolidly heterosexual,

and was rumoured to be pursuing

the mother of one of the pupils.

But perhaps that was a front – and a high risk

one at that. Maybe the risk was what

really mattered – in Isfahan, Lagos?

Do some of us deliberately chose

a life of hard labour? I think he got

irony. If so, ending his days

in Alvor – a thirty-minute drive

from the port of Lagos that gave its name

to the Nigerian capital, and was

the centre of the European slave trade,

still preserving the purpose-built market

where African slaves had been sold – might have

made him a tad rueful.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CARNIVAL

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read522 views

Sudden heavy rain scatters on the skylights

of the hotel’s restaurant – and finds a small gap

in the putty last summer baked biscuit-dry.

A drop falls then another onto the floor’s tiles.

The apologetic waitress carries

my Pastis, Vittel and Madeleines

to a dry table near the door. I follow

with the ashtray and packet of Gitanes.

She asks me if later I am going to see

the carnival in the square. I say, ‘Peut être’.

 

I have just finished my liqueur, eaten my cakes,

and am about to light up another Gitanes,

when two early, sodden, loud revellers

enter the restaurant. The smoke and noise

of the carnival follows them briefly.

I think of ‘Une Soirée Au Carnaval’,

that surreal painting by Henri Rousseau,

part time artist, full time customs officer.

 

A woman and a man in fancy dress

stand in front of dark, calm, leafless trees.

He looks at us, she at him. He is Pierrot,

she Columbine in a peasant bonnet.

A street lamp has been lit. In the clear, dry sky,

a full moon and scattered stars are shining.

There is only the soft soughing of the wind.

Though they are dressed for joy, there seems to be

no merriment. They are impassive, still.

Meanwhile, in the round window of what might be

a shelter in the wintry copse where

Columbine and Pierrot patiently wait,

lit by the street lamp is an older man’s head.

He has a moustache, and wears a peaked cap.

 

The new customers are dressed in costume too: he

as Marie Antoinette, observing

the crumbs of Madeleine still on my plate,

and winking; she as Louis XV,

smirking at my apparent disapproval

of such contraband merriment. ‘Après nous

– le deluge!’ she guffaws.

 

 

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POETRY

SPOILS OF WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read488 views

For more than eighty years the wind, the blown sand,

the salty air, and the high tides have softened

the geometrical edges of brick,

and concrete, and cut stone – detritus

of the eighteen-month long Liverpool Blitz

of nightly sirens, fires, and devastation,

removed, lorryload after lorryload,

for the maintenance of morale, from the

maritime city’s mercantile centre,

and dumped, just beyond the mouth

of the Mersey’s broad estuary,

on the beach between Crosby and Blundellsands,

that faces south-west across the shipping lanes

of Liverpool Bay towards North Wales,

Ireland, the Azores – imperceptibly

becoming again merely the minerals

they were made from, dispersing speck by speck

far into the oceans.

 

 

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POETRY

AN AMERICAN DECADE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read431 views

We watched the moon landing on a small tv –

black and white, of course – in a house built

the year before the First World War began,

when Britain’s was the richest, most powerful

empire the world had ever known, committing,

like a recidivist, seemingly endless

crimes against humanity in Africa

and South East Asia, its offences

in southern Ireland and the Scottish Highlands,

Australasia and the Americas

having already become history.

Not far from the house was the Mersey

and the Port of Liverpool (built on cotton),

at the Empire’s zenith the world’s busiest.

 

TVs in the States, of course, had been colour

since the 50s.  The ‘60s – which ended

with Old Glory’s triumph in the Space Race

over the Soviet Empire – included

the assassination of a president,

a descendant of Irish immigrants,

and the lynching of three black men, descendants

of African slaves.

 

 

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POETRY

A MANIFEST DESTINY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read417 views

Like stopped clocks narcissists can be guaranteed

to get something right at least once: witness

re-naming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf

of America – as the Romans named

the entire Mediterranean,

from Massilia to Carthage,

Levant to the Pillars of Hercules,

‘Mare Nostrum’. Even that advocate

of the USA’s imperial

expansion, and subjugation of Stone Age

peoples, President Thomas Jefferson –

slave owner, miscegenator, gardener,

and one of the Founding Fathers – accepted,

without demur, the 1550 map

that named the gulf El Golfo de México.

It might, after all, have been named for Cuba,

that elongated island – which Jefferson

coveted – that lies like a detached tongue

in the Gulf’s gigantic now poisonous maw.

 

The largest river that flows into the Gulf

is the Mississippi.  The ninety miles

from the mouth to Baton Rouge is known as

‘Cancer Alley’, and comprises mostly

poor, black parishes. Oil refineries

and petrochemical works discharge

their liquid waste containing PCBs,

dioxins, lead, mercury and phosphorus

into The Big Muddy, which then informs

the Gulf’s warming waters, steeped in oil

from the flotillas of drilling platforms –

mostly American – that float like scum.

 

Most marine species are dying, except for

oil-marinated Yellow-Fin Tuna

caught by trawlers out of Galveston, shipped

to US canneries and restaurants –

like old Saturn eating his children. So,

quite right and proper that the Union’s

47th President should fess up

and give the crime scene a fitting name.

 

 

 

 

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