POETRY

POETRY

AT THE BRIDGE

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read2.1K views

When I was poorly my mother read to me

from Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’:

Then out spoke brave Horatius, the Captain

of the Gate: “To every man upon

this earth, death cometh soon or late; And how

can man die better than facing fearful odds…”

He lived, was gifted land, and made in bronze.

 

But what I remember from those sickly days

is an image of the Captain, sword drawn,

and his two comrades. Behind them,

a second line of defence, they had fired

the only bridge across the Tiber.

Their duty was to stay the baying hordes

charging down the hillside towards them.

I see them now, three figures in a fiery

valley filled with flickering shadows,

waiting for the enemy.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CONVERT OR DIE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

In a large chamber behind the colossal

Doric colonnades four columns deep –

Bernini’s ‘maternal arms of mother church’ –

that enclose both sides of St Peter’s Square

is an exhibition: How Christ Was Brought

To The New World. There are extensive maps

and long lists of dates, the occasional

Christian martyr’s cross or chasuble,

and illustrations of happy converts,

but not a hint of the laying waste

to inconvenient cultures, the blood

and lamentation, the casuistry,

the theft, and servitude.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

LONGING AND DUTY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

We visited the Vatican the first week

of January so there was only

a short queue for the Sistine Chapel,

and few visitors, once inside, to distract

from possibly Rome’s most famous work of art;

its gaudy magnificence; its lavish

genius; its conspicuous wealth; its

indulgent humanness; its celebration

of beauty, of flesh, and immortality.

 

Michelangelo, painter, architect,

sculptor and poet, spent months on his back

creating The Last Judgement on the ceiling –

a graphic history of prophesy.

One of the polymath’s sonnets ends:

‘…love makes perfect our friends here on earth

but death makes them more so in heaven’.

 

We left the Vatican via the Library

with its seventy thousand volumes.

There was an exhibition of illustrated

manuscript versions of Virgil’s works –

possibly the city’s most famous poet –

each much more than a millennium old,

fragments saved during the papacy’s

many epochs of acquisitiveness.

 

One illustration depicts Dido,

Queen of Carthage, on her funeral pyre.

She had been jilted by Aeneas, who left

to do his god-given duty to found Rome.

She killed herself with her ex-lover’s sword.

The poet has Aeneas – who had carried,

on his back,  his own aged father from Troy’s

burning ruins – watch the funeral pyre’s

receding flames as he sailed, almost due north,

across what would become Mare Nostrum.

 

 

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POETRY

ANGELS AND VANDALS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

Everywhere in central Rome is sentient:

the Coliseum; St Peter’s Square;

the Spanish Steps; Castel Sant’ Angelo –

a towering, cylindrical building,

originally the Emperor Hadrian’s

mausoleum then a bolt hole for besieged

popes and, finally, for centuries,

a prison, and place of execution,

before becoming a museum.

 

We are approaching the castle this New Year’s Day

across the Ponte Sant Angelo, with its

ten sculptured, twice life-size, Baroque angels.

Beneath the Angel With The Crown Of Thorns

are three Roma children, a boy and two girls,

the latter dressed in long multi-coloured skirts,

their hair hidden by tightly wrapped scarves.

While the older girl begs,  the other two

are lighting some kindling they have brought.

 

The Castel Sant Angelo is the setting

for the final act of Puccini’s ‘Tosca’.

While Napoleon’s army is advancing –

so Rome will be sacked yet again –

Tosca, a famous soprano, stabs

the lecherous Scarpia, Chief of Police.

She thinks she has tricked him into saving

her lover – but the bullets the firing squad

discharges in the prison yard are real

and Cavaradossi, a painter, dies.

In her grief she sings, ‘O Scarpia,

avanti a dio!’, then runs up the steps

to the parapet – where we are standing –

and throws herself over the ramparts.

We can see the snow on the Apennines,

the Tiber flowing fast and olive below,

and, on the bridge, two armed policemen chasing

the children, whose small bonfire is blazing now.

 

 

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POETRY

SAINT COLUMBA AND THE CURLEWS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2.1K views

If I were obliged to chose a patron saint

it might be Columba – his Irish name

Colmkill, Dove of the Churchyard. He was

a poet, a scholar, a missionary

to the Western Isles, and all of Scotia.

 

So what had drawn him to Christianity

on the far Celtic edge of Europe?

One god? Redemption? Or the hieratic

Latin manuscripts he had learned to read –

long after the empire of Ancient Rome

had imploded west of Byzantium?

 

He had studied, I am sure, the sunlit groves

of the Hesperides, and would dream, when days

lengthened into gentler nights, and warmer,

summer winds blew from the distant south,

of bird-thronged orchards lush with golden apples –

but always heard the curlews calling

along the dark and glittering shore.

 

 

 

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POETRY

DEAD ELEPHANTS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

Whenever and wherever I encounter

the idiom about the elephant

in the room I think of Clive of India –

the victor of the Battle of Plassey,

main accessory of the first Bengal

Famine, multi-millionaire, whose crimes,

Samuel Johnson claimed, ‘impelled him

to cut his own throat’, and whose controversial

statue stands in Shrewsbury’s town square –

and of Lancelot Spode, a stringer

for The Shropshire Gleaner, who, one foggy

November day in the ’50s, disappeared.

 

Spode’s new silver grey Triumph Mayflower

was found, locked, on the road from Market Blandings

to Much Middleford, not a league from

Moreton Say, Clive’s birthplace. The stringer,

it is said, continually searched

the whole of Salop for what he thought

would be the century’s scoop: the graves

of the three elephants it was rumoured

Clive had brought back alive from India.

 

A distant and long dead relative of mine,

a man who could have passed as Trotsky’s dad,

would claim, after a drink or three, to have found

in the wild grounds of a derelict mansion

between Moreton Say and Market Snodsbury –

long ago rebuilt as an hotel and spa –

three deep pits, overgrown, and empty.

Not far from them, still intact, was the rusted

spiral of a reporter’s notebook.

 

 

 

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