POETRY

POETRY

THAT MEMORABLE SCENE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.3K 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 read2.2K 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 read1.7K 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 read2.7K 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 read2.9K 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
POETRY

SNOWDROPS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2K views

In a weathered flower pot, its dark green glaze

inscribed with abstractions, are four snowdrops,

carefully planted like the four points

of a weather vane, their blooms, as yet

still tight, unopened, like paper lanterns

on long curving poles – as if in the lush heat

and humidity of some miniature,

ornamental, oriental garden

replete with palm fronds, and liana,

and distant gongs. In an easterly wind –

that has been blowing for days from the tundras

of Siberia, over the vast lowlands

of the European Plain, and the grim

North Sea, across the moorlands of the Peaks,

and the clayey fields of the Cheshire Gap –

they are trembling slightly.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment

Recent Posts