POETRY

POETRY

HOMEWARD BOUND

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.4K views

Our travelling companions, in their many

thousands, are mostly old or middle aged –

here from all parts of this divided land,

here where a local man set off a bomb,

in this utilitarian, concrete arena

magicked into a digital theatre.

 

‘The Mississippi Delta is shining like

 a National guitar,’ sings the elderly,

almost diminutive troubadour

from New York City, still centre stage

with his acoustic guitar, ironic

and lyrical, after all this time.

 

‘And she said losing love is like a window

in your heart. Everybody sees you’re blown

apart. Everybody sees the wind blow…

 

He has a young man’s energy. His voice,

nearly pristine, is rasped with wisdom.

Imagine Cole Porter and Irving Berlin

touring the world with their own orchestras!

 

‘And sometimes when I’m falling, flying,

And tumbling in turmoil, I say, Whoa…

 

He is accompanied by an off-stage host

of engineers, technicians and crew,

and backed by a multi-talented,

cosmopolitan band of angels.

 

‘…I’ve reason to believe we will all

be received in Graceland.’

 

 

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POETRY

ROYALE DE LUXE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read2K views

We’re crossing the Mersey on the Dazzle Boat

aka MV Royal Daffodil. A breeze

is blowing from the river’s mouth. Sun lights

the Cunard Building like a palazzo.

 

We’re crossing to see the Giants from Nantes

on the Pier Head and at Mann Island,

along The Strand and in Canning Dock –

here by way of the Loire, Biscay Bay,

the North Atlantic and the Irish Sea.

 

We’re standing with tens of thousands of others –

a dense gathering by St George’s Dock Gates

of sardined and cheerful human beings –

watching the Giant Uncle, who is

four storeys high and has melancholy eyes,

walk – with the aid of gantries and pulleys

and costumed human counterweights – towards us

down Water Street to meet the Little Boy,

a thoughtful-looking black child, with his dog.

 

We’re crossing on the Royal Iris home.

Our bodies’ imaginations still tingle

with street theatre. Scores of Liverpool’s

serious windows are burnished gaily

by the sun setting over the sea.

 

Note: Royale De Luxe

 

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POETRY

FROM AN ARMCHAIR

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

Through the large window at the end of the room

I can see, out in the April garden,

a sudden wind broadcasting the blossom,

from next door’s ancient pear tree, like snow flakes.

A female blackbird is collecting bedding

and struts of twigs and grass, and airlifting

them into the ivy that covers the fence.

 

On the CD player, between melody

and chords, a dead guitarist’s fingers

slide so poignantly across the strings and frets.

 

A black and white lithograph, fifty eighth

in a series of a hundred entitled

‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’, bought in Moscow’s

Izmailovsky Market – the May Putin

was first crowned – from the artist’s son, the father

fallen, like most of Russia on hard times, shows,

through a thicket, a tangle of leafless

birch trees, a stretch of water gleaming: beyond,

a low rise with a pale fence and a wooden

dacha small against an alabaster sky.

 

I write a couplet, in my head, that is

of such Arcadian perfection, of such

bucolic beauty, it stutters into

silence, like the light of fireflies in a jar.

 

 

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POETRY

THE GREENING OF CRETE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2.4K 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 read1.7K 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 read2.1K 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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