POETRY

POETRY

THE WEIRD SISTERS

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

Since only the victors – usually men –

get to write history, so the renown

of the poet and of the painter, Willie

and Jack Yeats, has almost totally

obscured the sisters’, Lolly and Lily,

and their Cuala Press: from an era

when misogyny was even more

commonplace than now, and most members

of either gender accepted it.

 

They published new work only – all set

and printed by hand by a female workforce:

Willy’s poems, of course, and Jack’s graphics,

J.M. Synge, Oliver St John Gogarty.

They were one of the keys to the Celtic

Revival; recasting the South, the Free State,

Eire, the Republic of Ireland;

erasing the simian images

of the centuries’ of uprisings,

and the skeletal icons of the Famine.

 

The literary editor was their big brother.

The Press was frequently in the red

with cash flow problems, which the bank manager

seemed to believe resulted entirely

from a business run and owned by women.

William would grudgingly settle the debts

when he had cash to spare, like the Nobel Prize,

seeming to forget that the hard work

of his unmarried sisters had financed

the whole Yeats’ household – father, mother, siblings –

during crucial years of near penury.

Almost the last book they printed was

Patrick Kavanagh’s long and angry poem,

The Great Hunger, published during World War 2,

about Paddy Maguire, loveless, childless,

farming the unrelenting fields of Armagh.

 

The Yeats sisters, who had always wished

to live separately but were forced

to share the same dwellings throughout their lives,

share the same grave and simple headstone

in St Nahi’s Church of Ireland graveyard,

Dundrum, now a suburb of Dublin –

with the largest shopping centre in Ireland –

a village when the sisters lived there.

 

Lily and Lolly have been immortalised

in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Buck Mulligan,

holding court in the Martello Tower,

remarks: ‘Five lines of text and 10 pages

of notes about the folk and fishgods of Dundrum.

Printed by the weird sisters in the big wind’.

Was it tact, or misogynistic

disdain, kept them unnamed?

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

THAT MEMORABLE SCENE

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

At the eastern end of the Banqueting House –

which the deposed tyrant Charles Stuart had had

the architect Inigo Jones design

with its Rubens ceiling centre piece –

wooden steps were constructed from the stone floor

to the window sill, and wide enough so that

the condemned and two soldiers might climb abreast.

The scaffold was built against the outside wall,

and level with the sill so the long windows

could be opened like a pair of doors.

The platform extended almost half way

across the street so that all could clearly see

what it meant to kill a king, to be

no longer bound subjects but free citizens.

 

On that January Tuesday the poet,

Andrew Marvell, attended the beheading:

 

He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe’s edge did try;

Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless right,

But bowed his comely head

Down as upon a bed.

 

Charles’s head was severed with one blow.

It was lifted by its hair and shown

to the crowd, as custom dictated,

by the masked executioner, who threw it

to the soldiers below.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

SIMONSTOWN, FALSE BAY, SOUTH AFRICA

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2K views

Where the dual carriageway to Simonstown

is nearest the bay some cars were parked

on the hard shoulder and some folk were standing

on the stony beach. A Southern Right Whale

had calved near the shallows. We stood with strangers,

in the silence, watching the suckling baby

and the mother in their huge gentleness.

 

False Bay is wide as a sea, as deep,

so-called because sailors without charts

thought it was Table Bay twenty miles west.

Simonstown was one of the last to accede

to Apartheid. A colonial port,

way station to the East, British dockyard,

it became a diverse place of Dutchmen

and Lascars, Jews and Muslims, entrepreneurs

and runaways, Xhosa guides, and Khoisan

strayed the few miles from the heather of the Cape.

 

Opposite our guesthouse was a cove where whales,

at the end of the breeding season, came,

like ships of the line, to scrape off barnacles,

before their journey to the sounding oceans.

 

As we left town we passed the main car park,

and, at its edge, eight young men in white

and navy blue from Khayelitsha township

singing a capella: ‘Nkosi

sikelel’ iAfrika’.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

MADAGASCAR

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

Like Iceland, New Zealand, and the isles

of the South Atlantic, Madagascar

for most of its ninety million years or so

had been untouched by homo sapiens –

until we carved out logs, invented paddles,

outriggers, sails, and learned to read sun and winds.

 

Almost as soon as the first sailors

had come ashore the forests were slashed

and set alight, the flightless Elephant Bird

and the Giant Lemur were extinguished.

 

***

 

The damp air of New Year’s morning is heavy

with the spent gunpowder of last night’s fireworks,

and the cloying smoke of wood-burning stoves,

so we are going to the Zoo to see

the lemurs in their new enclosure,

where we hominids may walk amongst them

as if through the dense forests of their island.

 

The Zoo conserves five of the hundred species

of lemur, the world’s oldest primate,

and peculiar to Madagascar.

Larger than cats, surer than squirrels

two Red Ruffed Lemurs have leapt to the top

of the tallest tree in the enclosure –

and are calling loudly to each other,

aggressively it seems to us viewers below.

Perhaps some ancient memory impelled them

to the canopy’s highest point so that they

might see their green and pristine land, but instead

found only scorched plains of felled baobobs

and the red earth haemorrhaging into the sea

under a poisoned sky.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

AFTER THE PANTOMIME

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.2K views

When all of the evils are back in their box,

and those who can have been paired in marriage –

to an ovation from an audience

of boy scouts, elderly innocents,

and coach parties from Rhyl and Wallasey –

we emerge into Theatr Clwyd’s bar.

We watch, in awe, through the long glass window,

a vestigial sunset above Moel Famau –

variegated layers of coral

beneath a looming indigo bank of cloud.

Below – in the darkening river valley

of ribbons of homes, old mine shafts, quarries,

used car dealerships, and the Alyn’s waters

out of sight over glacial stones –

a billow of smoke, snaking round houses

at the edge of Mold and onto the hillside,

is rising white as steam.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
5 Comments
POETRY

ALMA MATER

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2.5K views

When Queen Elizabeth died I remembered

that my uncle Tom died the same month

as her father, King George. Both were veterans

of the First World War – one of the Battle

of Ypres, one of the Battle of Jutland.

Both private and prince were heavy smokers

till near the end – roll ups, Benson & Hedges.

 

Tom was gassed at Ypres. After the war

he became a pastry chef until

the Depression. Later, during the next

World War and subsequently, he made

packing cases in an aircraft factory.

Children take for granted the adults

around them. Later we avoid unpicking

memories – so it had not occurred to me

until now that Tom appeared to have no friends,

no interests, or possessions, or

to wonder why. And, of course,

there is no one alive left to ask.

 

After his death, I was moved into his small,

impersonal bedroom above the hall –

in our 1920s rented, pebble-dashed,

three bedroom semi with a privet hedge.

When Tom was alive six of us lived there.

The five who remained were me, my mother,

her older sisters, and my grandmother;

an only child, two widows, and two spinsters;

four formative women, who are still vivid in my heart.

But Uncle Tom evades me. Perhaps

he had shut down his life some time before.

 

I lived there from age five to sixteen.

Though death and loss and regret were near

neighbours, and my granny and her daughters

talked mostly about the past – making me

both risk-averse and ambitious –   it was not

a cheerless place. It was a house with books;

an upright piano, which I learned to play,

and for which I had a ready audience;

and a number of pictures – including

a print of Somerscales’ ‘Off Valparaiso’

on the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

So we all passed it at least twice a day.

 

Tom would have looked at it, presumably,

though perhaps he was always too fatigued

in his fifties then from physical work

with lungs damaged in youth by the mustard gas.

Whether I actually did or not, memory

tells me I would stop and study the print.

Someone must have told me Valparaiso

is a port on South America’s west coast,

and the ship featured in the picture

must have been heading for the harbour,

since a pilot boat is waiting for it,

which the ship acknowledges but refuses.

The three masted barque, from beyond Cape Horn

and the Southern Ocean, into the azure

Pacific seas, is steering almost

towards us, the wind in its sails – an image

of grace and purpose, of power, and of risk.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
4 Comments