POETRY

POETRY

SUFFER THE LITTLE WALLABIES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.3K views

I very seldom sign online petitions

regarding the welfare or otherwise

of non-human animals, assuming

that if we gave proper consideration

and care to one another the rest

of the animal kingdom would prosper

accordingly. I made an exception

today signing and sharing one entitled

‘Save the Wallabies of Loch Lomond’.

 

The Loch is a freshwater lake whose north

is in the highlands, its south in the lowlands.

It is the subject of a Jacobite song of love

and death – ‘The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond;

has more than thirty islands, some crannogs

man-made in prehistoric times, most

organic, all uninhabited, like

Inchconnachan, ‘Island of the Colquhons’,

whose property it was from medieval times.

 

For Fiona, Countess of Arran, née

Colquhon, Scottish power boat champion,

‘the fastest woman on water’, from childhood

the island was a haven. In time

she built a timber-framed bungalow,

boathouse and pier for her personal use.

On their estate in Hemel Hempstead,

near St Albans, in the Home Counties,

she and the Earl kept non-native mammals,

like llamas, alpacas, and wallabies.

Shortly after the end of World War II,

for some unrecorded reason she settled

a troop of the marsupials on the island.

For more than seventy years they have lived

in harmony with native flora and fauna.

 

The new owners want the wallabies removed,

whether exiled or culled is not clear –

hence the petition. Some see them as a

rather charming quirk of history,

a useful tourist attraction – others

an invasive species. These wallabies

are yet another victim of the British

Empire, and the selfish, careless whimsy

of landowners ancient and modern.

They are no more responsible for where

they are or what they are doing than escaped

mink eating grouse eggs on some money-making

moor, or, from some vast estate, self-seeded

rhododendron, lush and exotic

in the acid soils of Scotland’s west coast, its

empty glens cleared of folk.

 

 

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POETRY

RETURN OF THE NATIVE

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments2 min read2.6K views

The Conservative and Unionist Party

of Great Britain – aka The Tories,

from the Irish for ‘robbers’, ‘marauders’ –

is the longest surviving political

organisation in the known world.

It not only parks its tanks on its

opponents’ lawns, but commandeers

the greensward and the house it belongs to.

It reinvents itself by reversing

policies without embarrassment – viz.

welcoming East African Asian

refugees, hoping to send (mostly Muslim)

refugees to Rwanda; selling off

council houses under Margaret Thatcher,

homes that were built under Winston Churchill.

 

And Churchill is perhaps their greatest hero,

and an icon for all seasons – a romantic,

soldier, writer, painter, orator,

brick-layer, alcoholic, racist –

whose views and traits have been edited.

It was he who described Hindus as ‘foul’,

and Muslims as ‘warriors’, and predicted

that if the British ever left India

the Muslims would take over the Raj, and run it

as if the British had never gone home.

 

So what would he have made of a Hindu,

and a teetotaller, at the dispatch box,

albeit a babu, a Wykehamist,

an Oxford man, a multi-millionaire?

What would he, as the Home Secretary

overseeing the so-called Battle

for Stepney, the Siege of Sydney Street –

that shoot-out with Russian émigrés –

have made of the occupation of so much

of Belgravia by Russian oligarchs?

As one of the Council of Europe’s

begetters, and its human rights convention,

what would he have made of the Tories’

long suicide note called Brexit, and their

obsession with rigid inflatables

steering for Dover, with fascist scapegoats?

 

Perhaps nativism would triumph –

that, whatever your colour, as long as

you are born here, and speak the lingo

with more or less the right accent, and have

a hierarchy of people to despise,

then you are one of them?

 

 

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POETRY

AMONG THE TRUMPETS

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

A committee of eight Hebrew scholars –

politically balanced between high church

and puritan – produced in Cambridge

University four hundred years ago,

what Tennyson called ‘the greatest poem’,

the King James’ version of The Book of Job.

They were not paid but promised possible

preferment – essential for some comfort

in the church and the groves of academe

of a country racked by civil strife.

 

Their contribution to the new monarch’s

pursuit of national unity

was ten books: from Chronicles – ‘These are the sons

of Israel…’ – to The Song of Solomon –

‘Let him kiss me with the kisses

of his mouth.’ The Book of Job was the sixth.

 

Imagine a committee of divines,

an octet of cloistered pedants producing

not a camel but a steed that ‘saith

among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he

smelleth the battle afar off, the

thunder of the captains, and the shouting…’

 

 

 

Note: the poem was first published on the site in November 2015.

 

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POETRY

FIELD AND FOUNTAIN, MOOR AND MOUNTAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

The pandemic’s lockdown rules having been eased

we crossed the border into Wales to visit

our favourite country seat, on a late autumn’s

sunny day, cold and dry. The car park

was almost empty – and the main yard,

where the hay loft was and the saw pit,

entirely so except, this being

close to Christmas, Bing Crosby, disembodied,

singing ‘We Three Kings…’ Out in the gardens

two mothers and four infants cheerily

followed the Peter Rabbit Winter Trail,

running to find Lily Bobtail, Tommy Brock,

then Squirrel Nutkin. Rooks gathered in the limes,

and a magpie crossed the lake loud with mallards.

In one of the borders orange flowers

were still blooming – alstroemeria,

Lily of the Incas – and in another

an ornamental banana tree burgeoned,

testament to the earth’s slow burning.

 

The sky was filling with cumulus clouds

whiter than snow, drifting slowly from the north,

as we returned to the yard where Bing

was still singing of the Magi, a journey,

and a star. The late afternoon was full

of innocence and design, theology

and intimations, children, obligations.

We left, careful on the winding lanes,

wondering if Peter Rabbit had been found.

 

 

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POETRY

SOMEBODY DIED

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.4K views

Once the death had been formally announced,

a member of the commentariat

remarked that the prospect of dying from cold

and hunger in one of the earth’s richest countries

had been rendered ‘insignificant’.

 

The Holocaust Memorial in Hyde Park,

London – one of the city’s eight ‘Royal Parks’ –

was turned into a garden of remembrance

for a rich old woman who died in her bed.

 

The Speaker of the House of Commons,

one of whose predecessors defied a king

and his torturers, declared the funeral

to be “the most important event

the world will ever see” – so putting

the Big Bang, the ability to make fire,

the invention of the wheel, Jesus Christ,

and the end of human life on earth,

for example, into their proper place.

 

***

 

Through medieval mummery that hints at

the divine right of monarchs to rule

and nostalgia for the greed of empire,

politicians and pundits and priests –

who patronisingly tell us what we feel

and what we have felt for seventy years –

have bamboozled this divided nation.

Millions of children go hungry each day

yet we are taxed to fund a lavish,

three-ring circus of inanity,

where few are entitled, and many defer,

where all dissent is cancelled or shamed,

and new divisions appear like sudden

sinkholes in a busy, familiar street.

 

***

 

After a long day of 24/7

coverage of flags, martial music,

and gold brocade, of piped laments, drum beats,

and bells tolling, of mobile phones held aloft,

and superstitious symbolism sanctified,

I remembered her father’s funeral,

when I was nine. We had the day off school.

 

With my maternal grandmother, who was born

six years before Queen Victoria

took the title Empress of India,

I watched the procession live in black and white

on our new tv with its nine inch screen.

There were no daytime tv schedules then,

and very few cameras capable

of outside broadcasts, so the programme

must have been comparatively short,

but the Dead March from Handel’s ‘Saul’, the slow march

of the sailors pulling the gun carriage –

that had borne the dead king’s father’s coffin,

his grandfather’s, and his great grandmother’s –

their deliberate steps, sliding each foot

so slowly before returning it to earth,

like booted dancers in grey greatcoats,

seemed to last almost forever on that

cold February day, when I first learned

what we will do for death.

 

 

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POETRY

VICTORIA TOWER GARDENS

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

A ripped Union flag is limp in a tree.

Adjacent to the Houses of Parliament –

a Gothic revival currently crumbling –

these pleasant tree-lined and lawned gardens were once

a sewerage works and riverside jetties.

 

From the embankment the silhouettes moving

to and fro on distant Westminster Bridge

are like figures in a shadow play.

Below on the narrow strand strewn with rubble

is commotion. Two Egyptian geese –

imported as ornamental wild fowl

during the Glorious Revolution –

are urging their brood of four goslings

upstream with warning calls, meanwhile mobbed

by two Grey-legged and two Canada geese.

 

Emily Pankhurst in stone declaims, beckons.

Rodin’s black bronze Burghers of Calais

seem bemused by royal whimsicality.

Close to the site of the planned but disputed

Holocaust Memorial a shape

in a sleeping bag lies near the lawn’s edge.

It moves as a group of language students pass.

Safer to try to sleep rough in loud daylight.

 

Buxton’s abolitionist memorial

is illustrated with Aesop’s fables.

The slave tells us how the boar and the lion

stop fighting, realising that only

the vulture will win.

 

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