POETRY

POETRY

A POEM FOR MY GRANDDAUGHTER

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments2 min read2.3K views

I became 12 at the end of ’53.

That year we had bought our first TV

(with a 9 inch screen) to watch the Queen

being crowned. Just in time for the crowning

the British – with some help – had ‘conquered’

Everest. That September I had started

at the grammar school which had been founded

by Henry VIII after he had robbed

the local monastery. The masters

were begowned, the corridors stone-lined, dark.


Placing the sides of our blue and green striped caps

equidistant from our ears – as per

the British obsession with school uniform –

we would take the short walk through the city

to a Georgian building that had been

a charity school. There we had science

and ‘dinners’. Next door was a brewery.

As we lit the Bunsen burners, and ate

the grisly meat and semolina,

we could smell the pungent brewing of hops.

We were forbidden to eat in the street.


At some point I had lost my sense of humour,

had forsaken The Beano and The Dandy –

with their roll-calls of impromptu anarchists,

like Dennis the Menace and Korky the Cat –

for The Eagle, and its square-jawed, upper class,

Scottish space hero, Colonel Dan Dare,

and his fat batman, Digby, who came from Yorkshire.


That summer I had read Enid Blyton’s,

‘The Famous Five Have A Wonderful Time’,

knowing that it would probably be

the last time I read such a book, that

my childhood was ending, and being grown up

was approaching – sometimes like a huge iceberg,

sometimes like an imminent, hoped-for

landfall on a fragrant coast that was just

over the horizon.

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POETRY

THE RIVER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

 

This river, deeper than most in metaphor,

abundantly fluent in simile, 

is in spate. Its frantic, muddy currents

rush from rain-filled mountains, which seas formed, ice shaped.

The unruly, tramelled waters race past fields

with tended hedgerows, and furrows ploughed,

and cattle standing – past the ends of streets,

windows blank with light, curb stones unmoved.

The hectic flow roars, downstreams towards us:

its colour turbulent, tarnished gun-metal;

the froth of its creamy foam divided,

severed by the axe-shaped arches of the bridge

we stand on, seemingly safe from the surge.

We raise our voices above the abundance,

above the dissonance.

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POETRY

CORMORANTS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

In the driest months when the tidal river

is low and the current almost lethargic,

when the waters flow gently over the weir

the Normans built to create a fish pool,

you can see the cut sandstone blocks from which

the sloping dam was made. Near the southern bank

salmon steps were constructed, and a mill-race –

where this winter’s spate has jammed a fallen tree.

On the groyne between the steps and the race

eleven cormorants stand, spreading their wings,

facing down stream. The river hurtles past,

as if the ice caps had begun melting.


The highest tides expunge the weir entirely,

leaving, momentarily, a gleaming,

shifting, swollen calm. One of the cormorants

dives, then another, until they are all

submerged in muffled memories of the sea.

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POETRY

THE GROVES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

For Matt Baker

We are sitting on a bench in a peaceful

place popular even on a winter’s day

now lockdown has been eased. This tree-lined

terraced embankment beside the river –

with a bandstand and moorings for pleasure boats –

was commissioned by one of the city’s

Victorian worthies at his own expense

to match the elegant pedestrian

suspension bridge built by a developer.


If we sit here long enough with our take-out

hot chocolates and toasted sandwiches –

counting the passersby wearing masks –

someone we know may saunter past with their dog.

Here there used to be a whiteness of swans,

but a flock of panhandling black-headed gulls,

squawkily scrambling for the odd dry crust,

has, as it were, elbowed out the large mute birds.


When the Roman mercenaries built the camp

on the sandstone bluff behind us, when barques

from Anjou docked downstream with cargoes

of wine and spices, the air, like now,

was multi-lingual. We can hear snatches

of French and Polish, Greek and Arabic.


If we sit here long enough late winter’s

high tide may rise, as now, over the weir,

and begin to cover the embankment’s steps,

propelling various bosky flotsam

upstream at a proverbial rate of knots,

with a couple of mallards and a moorhen

floating past on a wizened trunk the size

of an alligator from the bayous.

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POETRY

SALMON LEAP

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.4K views

An aged busker in a stetson sets up

on the river embankment near the café.

He talks at length about his life, then sings

Carole King’s ‘And it’s too late, baby now’.

The weary crowd applauds sporadically.

We walk towards the weir, where brown-tinted

helter-skelter roaring iridescent spume

catches the sunlight. We remember

when the salmon – from the North Atlantic

through the Irish Sea – leapt steps by the weir,

homing upstream in their birth river

to spawn. Industrial effluent released

continually has destroyed that.


A cormorant – one of a gulp that clusters

near the weir – dives, leaving only bubbles,

and emerges, an endangered eel

writhing in its beak.

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POETRY

COURAGE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.6K views

In the stretch from here to where the river bends

around the meadows, there have been drownings –

crowded pleasure boats upturned, youths,

desperate with raucous bravado,

jumping from the suspension foot bridge.

The river, which is a whorl and tension

of conflicting, muddied undertows,

seems linear today, almost emollient.


A children’s cancer charity has fastened

awareness-raising memento mori

to the wrought iron railings of the bridge.

The cards and photographs – obscuring

the occasional lovers’ padlock – are tied

together, and to the rails, carefully,

almost gaily, with golden ribbon. 

The charity promotes research. The bridge’s

wooden walkway registers each human step,

shifts with each tread, beating like a slow heart. 

One card begins, ‘If love could have saved you…’ 

We dare not imagine such loss, such

unendurable humility, such

self-effacing courage.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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