POETRY

POETRY

THE GREENING OF CRETE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2.3K views

The car’s headlights illuminate the verges

of the motorway through the foothills,

and show how high the rainfall has been.

Tall bushes of pink and white oleander

burgeon – beneath them, hyacinth, iris.

All around in darkness is the scrubland

humankind has made – with occasional

vineyards, orchards, and scant pasture for herds

of goats and sheep. It once was bourneless forest:

tamarisk, cypress, maple, oak, chestnut.

 

We arrive at the hotel long after midnight.

When we open our room’s patio door

we are surprised, this being two hundred feet

or so above sea level and the sea being

the Mediterranean, to hear waves

breaking rather loudly. We search for the light,

and, finding it, see the sounds are winds

roughly chafing a palm tree’s sword-shaped leaves

in the garden in front of the patio.

 

In the morning sunlight the breeze shakes the fronds

like drying clothes snapping on a line, or oars

erratically dipped then raised. The sun

catches the violet wings of a carpenter bee

gathering pollen from a red hibiscus bush

sturdy in the terracotta soil –

and, out of sight, a collared dove calls

flutingly ‘to-do-so, to-do so’,

and a church bell rings inexplicably.

From nowhere a flock of herring gulls flaps

across our view like raucous seafarers.

 

And there always over the wide bay – deep once

with sea turtles and octopus and swordfish,

the blue of its waters matching the sky’s –

is the grey massive of mountains thousands

of feet in height, scored with millennia

of run-off. They are pitted with caves –

refuges, holy places – cleft with gorges

so profound rain turns to vapour as it falls.

The compassing sun highlights each contour.

 

As daylight begins to fade swifts and swallows

loop and weave across the soft, prolific air.

During dinner a full moon rises

over the mountains, making the rippling bay

silver-gilt. Later, on the patio,

we hear thunder rumble out at sea.

Rain pitters and patters on the palm fronds.

Suddenly the storm breaks, becomes torrential.

All around us lightning cracks, forks, sheets.

 

Next day it rains unceasingly. Guests linger

on their phones – in the restaurant, in the bars –

wishing they were elsewhere, hurrying

up steps, along paths, through arcades swept

haphazardly with rain and wind to their rooms,

and the Wi-Fi and the flat screen TV.

 

 

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POETRY

WORLD HERITAGE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.6K views

We are heading directly south out of town

on Leoforos Knossou – Boulevard

Knossos – a straight kilometre long

dual carriageway with oleander bushes

in the central reservation, and lined,

on both sides, with parked cars and really useful

emporia: like banks, greengrocers,

ironmongers, and proper places to eat.

After Venezelio Hospital

it suddenly becomes a country road,

and shortly we arrive at the site,

and park up under a jacaranda.

 

Whatever the Boeing 737

Series 800 substituted

for fresh air has laid my grand daughter

and me a little low, so only

the idea – rather than the facts of

the excavation – appeals. Anyway

we have been here before. Now we are sitting

in the shade of a pine tree planted

by the archaeologist, Arthur Evans.

We can hear one of the official guides

who has a pronounced Australian

or New Zealand accent, and wonder

if she only guides visitors from

the Antipodes. In the quiet

after she has gone we hear the hoopoes

somewhere in the valley of olive groves

beyond the high wire-mesh boundary fence.

 

A tabby cat walks across the Western Court,

and people seem to give way to her.

My grand daughter follows with her camera.

When she returns she tells me the cat

had placed her kittens securely behind

one of Arthur’s pines. The photos show

the litter – some tabby too, some black and white –

suckling in what seems a tumble of fur,

the mother watchful. A small crowd gathered,

she tells me. I imagine the simple,

sentient spectacle: a tall, slender girl

photographing a cat and her kittens.

 

 

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POETRY

VERY IMPORTANT PROBLEM!

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2K views

‘Environment Agency figures earlier this year showed there were a total of 301,091 sewage spills [in England] in 2022, an average of 824 a day.’ THE GUARDIAN, May 2023

 

‘VERY IMPORTANT PROBLEM! is written in large,

black capital letters, at a slight angle,

with a marker pen, in the toilette

of an otherwise sophisticated

café – with organic credentials –

on the busy road from Iraklion

to Archanes, opposite the entrance

to Arthur Evans’ Villa Ariadne,

a short walk from the Knossos heritage site.

The ‘problem’ is toilet paper in the

toilet bowl, a generally

unbruited facet of modern Attic life.

 

Not much further on from Knossos the road

crosses the Archanes Gorge, which is spanned

by a now defunct aqueduct, built

by one group of imperialist invaders,

and later its flow enhanced by another.

It brought enough water from Mount Juktas

to the centre of Candia – now

Iraklion – for the daily needs,

including fountains, of a burgeoning

population of colonisers, first

the Venetians then the Ottomans.

Until recently, the site was visited

only by historians of hydraulic engineering,

and an old poet and his family.

 

Though there are myths and hypotheses,

we know factually very little about

the civilisation that built Knossos –

whose environs, at its zenith, housed

eighteen thousand people – including,

of course, what they wiped their bottoms with.

But we do know they had flush toilets,

clean water supply lines, and a system

of drainage that properly separated

rain water from sewage.

 

 

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POETRY

LOOK ON MY WORKS

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

If you stand in the Central Court of Knossos –

or in what is assumed to be the court –

and look north you can see, above the trees,

the top of the white geodesic radome

of a US air force tracking station

outside the hillside village of Gournes

less than ten miles from Iraklion.

 

The station was abandoned in ’94,

presumably as a contribution to

‘the end of history’. Much of it

has been looted and vandalised and left

to weeds but some parts house an aquarium,

a dinosaur park, an animal shelter.

Now Cyprus, Greece and Israel are allied –

in part to exploit off-shore gas reserves –

there is talk the base may be re-opened.

 

Sometimes in the millennia-old ruins

of the palace – the causes of whose

unrecorded abandonment has filled

volumes of conjecture – you may believe

you can hear a peacock calling, calling

in all its finery.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

WHEN THE WIND BLOWS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.5K views

When the island’s tourist industry began

to grow, a hillside – overlooking the bay,

and a short walk from the centre of town,

a port become a brief stop-over

for small cruise ships – was bought by an oil broker,

and transformed into a tiered hotel,

an open-air pool and bar at each level.

 

The one at the top is named ‘Aeolus’ since –

despite the high, glazed windbreaks – when the wind

prevails up there it moans through the gaps.

But Aeolus was merely keeper

of the winds – in a bag, according to

Homer. Zeus was god of all the weathers.

The hillside has been lashed with rain all day.

 

There is no one in the pool. In the bar

a member of the équipe d’animation

is still waiting, in a far corner,

to demonstrate Greek dancing to any

of the French guests who might wish to learn.

The barman, Alexandros, is employed

only for the season. Before Covid,

all through the autumn and winter months,

he would work on the cruise ships. Now he worries

for his family. Should they emigrate?

 

He is watching Alpha TV on his phone,

the images breaking from Kalamata,

famous for olives and olive oil –

in the Peloponnese peninsula, whose

population is in decline: body bags

on the dockside; survivors, all young men –

from Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan –

making for anywhere it seems but Greece,

staring at something only they can see.

 

Meanwhile, on the music loop that plays

like perpetual motion through the speakers

round the wind-swept pool and bar, Marvin Gaye

asks, ‘Anybody here seen my old friend,

Martin?’, and, later, Mick Hucknell will

‘wanna fall from the stars’.

 

 

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POETRY

CAPTAIN FLINDERS’ CAT: PROPERTY AS THEFT

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read2.9K views

Where should I begin? With the theft? Or the cat,

whose name was Trim? Or the Captain’s remains?

Or a statue marking the bi-centenary

of his death? Or with the two figures

missing entirely from the memorial?

Or the disappearance of the cat? Or

an uncanny coincidence?

 

I shall begin with an April weekend:

the Saturday, and a map – on the wall

of an exhibition at Tate Modern, London –

of Indigenous Australia,

of the original peoples’ numerous

countries not that they owned but to which

they had belonged for millennia.

 

And the following day, as we waited

at Euston Station with milling others

for trains delayed by signal failure

between two provincial towns, we saw,

for the first time, the Captain’s statue.

 

Matthew Flinders is half-kneeling, half-squatting

above the outline of the continent –

originally deemed Terra Nullius,

‘uninhabited land’ –  which he named as

Australia, and whose coasts he was the first

to map, so becoming, in effect,

an accessory after the fact of theft.

The pair of dividers in his right hand

bisects the country of the Balardung,

in what is now called Western Australia.

He has his back to his cat and the cat to him.

Trim looks north, over Baradha country,

in what is now the Northern Territory.

They were close companions on the sloop

that heaved to at each bay, cape, inlet

and estuary for the most part of a year.

 

Missing, of course, because the statue

commemorates a victim-less theft,

are the two Aboriginal men who sailed

with the cartographer and his cat,

as envoys and explainers knowing

the cultural protocols – though not

the numerous languages – of the people

upon whose countries they landed, and whose

ready acquiescence was essential.

They were Bungaree and Nanbaree,

though Flinders mentions only the former

and does not record his people or country.

 

Sailing home from Australia, Flinders

called at Mauritius for vittles and repairs.

Though France and Britain were at war again

the Captain thought he might be received

as scientist rather than naval officer –

but he snubbed the Governor socially,

and, despite the personal intervention

of Emperor Napoleon himself,

was locked up for six years. At some point the cat

disappeared, probably eaten –

Flinders surmised –  ‘by a hungry slave’.

 

There was an urban myth that the Captain’s remains

were buried under Euston’s Platform 15,

hence the statue erected in the forecourt

in 2014, the bicentenary

of Flinders’ death. Five years later,

when work began on the High Speed Rail Link,

to reduce travelling time on our small island

by thirty minutes, his coffin was unearthed

in St James’ Burial Grounds next

to the existing station, and really

not far at all from Platform 15 –

though the cartographer would have disapproved

of such carefree inexactitude!

 

Trim was a ship’s cat, the only survivor

of a litter born in a storm at sea,

named for that horizontal angle ships must

sustain to avoiding taking on water

at the bows or being sluggish at the stern.

If the cat had stayed in Australia

he would have become one of the ancestors

of the more than ten million domestic

and feral felines that, being invasive,

easily kill more than a billion

native animals – mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs –

per annum. And – whether owned or free –

wherever they pounce, they are trespassing,

however innocently, being themselves

victims, on stolen land.

 

 

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