POETRY

POETRY

DIVERSIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read533 views

Two sets of works on local busy A roads

on the same day, morning and afternoon,

diverted me down lanes I had not travelled

for decades: eastwards to Beeston Castle

on its sandstone rock, westwards to Essar’s

refinery on the Mersey marshes;

spring lanes edged with cow parsley, and banked

with hawthorn hedges flowering; Friesians

glimpsed through a gate, a ploughed field’s furrows

the turned colour of mahogany;

through Saxon settlements – Foulk Stapelford

and Hargrave, Picton Gorse and Little Stanney,

Hoofield and Wervin – as if the Romans

had never come, and the Normans never would;

from doomsday parish to doomsday parish;

sunlight shifting, seasons unfolding,

the past almost within grasp.

 

 

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POETRY

AMONG WINTRY REEDS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read442 views

Among wintry reeds not far from the horizon –

where mountain rain water and ocean brine,

the Dee and the Irish Sea, become one –

is a large, white, upturned hull, storm-wrecked

from its moorings in Connah’s Quay, perhaps,

certainly abandoned for twelve month and more,

too costly, maybe, to salvage. Such

a motley of flotsam: rusting buoys;

splintered pieces of superstructure;

frayed strands of nautical rope scattered

like serpents through the wetlands’ runnels;

decomposing in the teeming marshland

this sunny, January afternoon.

 

The light has gone in the west over the hills.

The chattering in the hidden lagoons

among marshland reeds has almost ceased.

Returning from the stubble fields inland

thousands and thousands of pink-footed geese,

collegiate in flight, were black and calling

against the westering sun. Now – migrants,

wintering from the Arctic islands: Iceland,

Greenland, Novaya Zemlya, Svalbard –

they are roosting in silent communes.

 

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POETRY

GLIMPSING GODS

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read762 views

That evening in the Poseidon Lounge of our

5 star clifftop hotel, spa & resort –

with the tideless Mediterranean

lapping soundlessly, timelessly out of sight –

there was something about the in-house

entertainment team’s announcing

the week’s festivities, some gaucheness perhaps,

an enforced glee, which reminded me

of school camp on the Lleyn Peninsula

the August I was nine, and we ate

Wagon Wheels round the fire, and told jokes

about Hitler, the war being recent.

 

The first day I woke anxious at dawn, and peed

in my sleeping bag. I told no one, and slept

in damp bedding for however many days

and nights we were there in the ex-army

ridge tent, vast, dark, noisome. Even in sun I

shivered and drifted as my fever rose –

and nobody knew. On Porth Neigwl beach,

or Hell’s Mouth, where Atlantic rollers roar

I dreamt –  beyond my insouciant fellows’

paleness in the shimmering and pulsing waves –

I saw a glistening, slate grey dolphin

rise and fall, effortlessly, endlessly.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

MISTAKEN IDENTITIES

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments2 min read907 views

‘The middle classes, in England as elsewhere, under democracy are morally dependent upon the aristocracy, and the aristocracy are morally in fear of the middle class which is gradually absorbing and destroying them. The lower classes still exist; but perhaps they will not exist for long. In the music-hall comedians they find the artistic expression and dignity of their own lives…With the dwindling of the music-hall…the lower classes will tend to drop into the same state of amorphous protoplasm as the bourgeoisie. T.S. Eliot, MARIE LLOYD, 1923

 

When I was a teenager in the ’50s

BBCTV, as if to prove

vaudeville were dead, would feature, at peak hours

music-hall acts in ‘variety shows’.

One such was G.H. Elliot, the self-styled

‘Chocolate Coloured Coon’. That a white, light tenor

and tap dancer should put on black-face, or rather,

brown-face, hence the ‘chocolate’, seemed no more strange

to my adolescence than Nuclear Tests,

Suez, Hungary, and the slowly emerging

truths about the Holocaust. In school,

about this time, we read The Journey

of the Magi – which prompted, sotto voce

at the back of the class, the cod carol,

‘We three kings of Warrington are, two

in a bottle, one in a jar’ –  and I thought,

possibly with youth’s wishful thinking,

the poet and the song-and-dance man were one.

I marvelled how the same person found time

to be both a ‘variety star’

and a ‘serious poet’, never mind

acquire the necessary know-how.

 

The poet has a plaque in Poets’ Corner,

Westminster Abbey. His ashes are buried

in East Coker, Somerset, from where

his ancestors moved to pillage and rape

the New World – and his anti-Semitism

has been duly contextualised.

The artiste’s headstone has been removed

from his grave in the parish churchyard

in Rottingdean – on England’s south coast

near Brighton, once popular with show-biz types –

pro tem, because of its ‘offensive language’,

which a stone mason will eradicate.

White, Christian entitlement, with its

patrician, imperial longings,

refreshing its lipstick…

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

JAZZ IN ROOM M

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read665 views

i.m. Anthony (Tony) Barrell

 

‘Jazz, unlike a bucket of nails, is full of paradoxes’.

Norman Granz, sleeve note to ELLA AND LOUIS

 

During term time he had an understanding

with the prefect in charge of the tuck shop,

which was on the ground floor of the decaying

annex. His record player was kept

under the counter until each Tuesday

after school, when it would be brought up a floor

to Room M. How he had persuaded

whoever he had had to persuade

to allow his fellow scholars to listen

to jazz at all never mind unsupervised

he never said, and we never asked.

He was Le Grand Meaulnes in that grammar school

of scholarship boys – founded, as part

of the reformation, by Henry VIII,

or, rather, the strategic Thomas Cromwell,

seeing the need for serried offices of clerks.

The annex was a neglected Georgian house

clamped to the substantial sandstone gateway

of the abbey Thomas and Henry dissolved.

 

The LPs he played were his – mostly big band,

Benny Goodman to Stan Kenton but sometimes

the quintet of the Hot Club of France. He was

the pedagogue par excellence – charming,

intense, generous, a good listener

in every way. We went there to learn.

He was very much our guru,

our rabbi – with a sharp sense of humour –

and at the start of a creative lifetime,

making important things happen for others,

in print, on the radio and TV.

The Head Master, a reverend, would have

considered him ‘anti’ – which translates as

‘willing and able to enable

others to see behind the curtain’.

 

One Tuesday he played us the album

‘Drum Battle’: Ella Fitzgerald vocals,

Oscar Petersen piano, percussion

Gene Krupa versus Buddy Rich – bandleaders,

erstwhile sidemen with Goodman and Dorsey –

a Jewish American and a Polish American,

on snare, bass, tom-tom, hi-hat, cymbals,

four beats to the bar in Carnegie Hall.

 

In that shabby room, its long sash windows

filled with views unchanged for centuries

of an English provincial city,

we were jazzmen chatting between solos –

about Lionel Hampton’s purple LP,

the Duke boycotting venues in the Deep South,

Django Reinhart evading the Nazis.

 

Note: Tony Barrell – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Barrell_(broadcaster)

 

 

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POETRY

THE CYBER DEAD

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read598 views

‘Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door,’ a busker

began to sing near to the ice cream kiosk,

just after I had left the public toilet,

its adamantine urinals made

in Burnley. I walked beneath the lime trees,

along the embankment. The brown river

swirled in spate, high with rains from the remnants

of Atlantic storms breaking on shorn

and distant mountains. I thought of those dead friends –

their social media accounts intestate –

forever alive, and orbiting

eternally in cyber space, so close

yet still and always forlornly ‘Knock-knock-

knockin’ on Heaven’s door’.

 

 

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