POETRY

POETRY

RESISTANCE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read459 views

A young man approaches as close as he can

to one of Goya’s paintings in the Prado,

‘El Tres de Mayo’ – also known as

‘The Executions of the Third of May’.

Napoleon has occupied Madrid.

A firing squad is set to execute

cowed citizens. A terrified man

in a floppy white shirt holds out his arms

in supplication, horror. Suddenly

the young man begins to sob, a visceral

weeping he cannot control. The young woman

with him instinctively looks round for help.

The other visitors are amazed, embarrassed.

He leaves clumsily, unfocused by tears

he cannot staunch. She follows, desperate.

 

Later, when they have returned home

he tells his story anonymously

to a reporter. He had gone to Spain

with his girlfriend – an art student

researching Goya – after he had finished

a tour of duty in northern Gaza.

The painting reminded him of an event

he had suppressed. His captain shot a man,

unarmed, hands up, pleading.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE MOON’S BACKSIDE AND RELATED MATTERS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read398 views

We speak of the “world being turned upside down” –

thinking perhaps of the earth’s richest,  most

powerful country freely electing as king

a felonious buffoon – but we should think

instead of the world turned back to front

so that, when the earth is spread out

flat as a map, it is not the Greenwich

Meridian at 0 degrees longitude

at its centre but its opposite twin

at 180 degrees, the Date Line.

Then to its left is the West: all of

Australasia, all of Asia,

Africa, Europe, most of Russia,

and a piece of Greenland – and right the East:

all of the Americas, most of Greenland,

and a very small piece of Russia.

So the centre of the world is not

threaded through London but through Fiji.

 

***

 

The rockets are soaring again. Like some

nineteenth century Great Game, China,

India and the US of A

are competing in exploration

and exploitation. People are dying

on earth unnecessarily – from

malaria, hunger, pollution, shrapnel,

blast, torture – and the rockets are soaring,

and obsequious hype fills the ether.

 

***

 

Meanwhile there are plans to rename parts

of the Moon’s posterior – no more

The Sea of Moscow or The Gagarin

Crater – and the plans for the lunar site

of the Acme University

of The Solar System are well advanced

now that the founders have approved the name.

 

After much informed and good natured debate

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk  and Mark Zuckerberg

have agreed that that august institution

on the moon’s rear should be named after

a six letter combination of the

first two initials of their surnames

in descending order of personal wealth – thus

the Mubezu Campus.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE SPARROW HATH FOUND A HOUSE

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read718 views

Once – how final and nostalgic that word sounds –

each year we had starlings nesting in the eaves,

and small flocks of sparrows twittering

in the bushes. Though the fluting wood pigeons,

the bel canto blackbirds, the clever robins

and the subtle wrens kept faith, one year

the starlings did not return, and the sparrows,

except for the odd passer-by, vanished.

 

This year the prodigal sparrows have begun

to return – a couple of pairs nesting

in the ivy. They and their offspring

peck nervously at the feeders hanging

from a dead branch of the aging plum tree.

At this year’s end I shall be eighty four.

And at my back I sometimes hear the absence

of the starlings, the skittering  of Death’s

nimble feet, and the sound of soft laughter.

 

***

 

If there were reincarnation I would wish

to return as a sparrow in a five star

hotel with Mediterranean airs;

with palms and olives and weeping figs,

bougainvillea and oleander;

where other birds are focussed on menace

like the hooded crow or stateliness

like the purple herons flying west

or just singing like the gold finches;

where the cat who has made the restaurants

its fiefdom is plump and insouciant,

and sleeps on cushions in the piano bar,

and the other cats prowl ostentatiously

among undergrowth on the margins of the grounds;

to be there preferably in the mid

and high seasons when guests, eating al fresco,

are careless with baklava and feta,

and broadcast sunflower seeds on balconies;

to enjoy the boisterous camaraderie

of meal times and the solitary quietness

as night falls; to hop and to fly as if

the whole world were ours.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SAND FLATS AT WEST KIRBY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read584 views

At low water the sand flats stretch unbroken

down the Dee estuary’s English coast

to the reed beds of Parkgate and Burton Marsh;

stretch beyond the islands in the river’s mouth –

Hilbre, Middle Eye and Little Eye –

towards the wind turbines in Liverpool Bay;

then along the head of the Peninsula,

past Meols, Leasowe, Wallasey and New Brighton,

to join the mudflats of the Mersey.

 

At low water the sand flats are safe to cross

to the islands – and you might feel you could walk

to that wind farm on Burbo Bank, or walk

to Wales and reach Snowdonia’s ranges,

despite the channels you cannot see,

and the waves encroaching which you cannot hear,

let alone see, because of the constant sound

of endless, restless, distant waters.

 

Here are such large skies of shifting clouds,

long veils of rain, unbroken sunlight –

such immense firmaments. This is a place

of horizons and mirage, of disquiet,

and exhilaration, like a lost element,

a lost dimension, as if you might glimpse

heaven or angels, or whatever else

may be at the world’s edge.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE CAVES AT TREMEIRCHION

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read335 views

From the terrace of the Jesuit college,

high above the Vale of Clwyd, the poet,

Gerard Manley Hopkins, searching, longing

for his faith, sees a kestrel on the thermals:

‘I caught this morning morning’s minion…

My heart in hiding Stirred for the bird.’

In the distance are the mountains and the sea;

over the vale Denbigh’s castle ruins;

north, at the river’s mouth, Rhyl – fishing village…

become seaside resort…become ghost town…

 

A mile or so south along the ridge

where Hopkins stood, and a few years after

he had left the seminary, caves –

formed hundreds of millions of years ago,

on the northernmost edge of the Ice Age world –

were uncovered: with bones of mammoths,

woolly rhinos, hyenas, and stone age tools,

evidence of millennia of human life,

Neanderthal then Homo Sapiens.

Hunting in the forests that filled the vale,

a natural spring below the caves, and shelter

from the weathers and to keep fires alight

made this as good as castle keep or town

 

Did their hearts rise, like the poet-priest’s,

watching the hawks, and grieve for the creatures

hiding in the ferns? Did they study the clouds

over the sea and the mountains, as he did

each morning on that terrace, searching for words

for things beyond themselves?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

A GIFT

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read320 views

They arrived abruptly, late in the morning

on a proper summer’s day – windows and doors

open to steep the house in a sun-warmed

stillness. We heard a sudden roaring,

an almost metallic whirring as if some

giant dynamo had just been started up.

 

The air above the garden was darkening,

gyrating with a swarm of wild bees. We felt

bewildered, apprehensive, ignorant

about beings so familiar, so mundane –

from when daisies and magnolias first bloomed,

shortly before small dinosaurs became birds.

 

Eventually – in what might have been

moments – they disappeared beneath

the branches of the Japanese cherry.

When we looked under the leafy awning

they had attached themselves to the trunk,

become one still mass around the queen,

broad then tapered like a roughcast urn.

 

Over the next days we checked frequently.

They remained, unmoved, enigmatic.

And then – perhaps one dawn while we were sleeping –

they must have left, leaving a white, urn-shaped

honeycomb adhering to the bark,

its hexagonal cells of beeswax empty

of pupae, pollen and honey. We felt

abandoned, and chosen.

 

 

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