POETRY

POETRY

FROM AGINCOURT TO MARIUPOL

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.2K views

Much of the history of modern Europe,

from Agincourt to Mariupol,

seems to comprise ignorant, arrogant

purportedly Christian armies – some ragged,

most well financed – advancing, retreating,

slaughtering innocents, telling lies,

with brief respites for rearmament,

and victory’s parades and revenges.

 

Even respectable men who should know

better, scholars and poets, politicos

and hacks, pretend to be soldiers, to ‘Hear

the drums of morning play. Hark the empty

highways crying “Who’ll beyond the hills away?”‘

They broadcast the recruiting sergeant’s drum roll –

for volunteers to step up and play

one of humankind’s most ancient games,

border disputes and the massing of troops.

 

The Soviets created the famine

in Ukraine, as the British did in Ireland,

to chasten the natives, remove them.

Such holodomors need not just a Peel,

a Russell, snug in 10 Downing Street,

or a Stalin, secure in the Kremlin –

choosing which omelettes are on the menu,

which eggs, and how many, should be broken –

but hierarchies of aiders and abetters,

dutiful enablers of iniquity.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

THE LITHOGRAPH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

The pandemic was daily news last year,

often from someone’s kitchen or study.

Once, behind a British virologist’s

talking head, was a black and white lithograph

from the same series of a hundred

as one we have: ‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’,

ours bought in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Market –

the May Putin was first crowned – from the artist’s

son, the father an emigré in New York.

 

Uncle Vanya and the Three Sisters

might stray into the etching’s romantic

melancholy, its stillness, its almost

ominous quietude, its imminent

sense of loss – as if the hawser taut

across the quarry in ‘The Cherry Orchard’

were about to snap at any moment.

Through a tangled thicket of leafless birch trees

a stretch of water gleams: beyond, a low rise

with a pale fence, and a wooden dacha small

against an alabaster sky.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

THE MAKING OF HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2K views

Though both of his parents were Party members

they had him secretly baptised in case

Stalin died. They often spoke about

the Doroga Zhizni, the Road of Life,

the ice routes built across Lake Ladoga

each winter, under bombardment, to help

lift the siege of Leningrad. He spent

much of his childhood chasing after rats

in the bombed-out ruins of Peter the Great’s

once imperial city. Perhaps he was

playing at being Ivan the Terrible

routing the Tatars from Crimea.

 

He appeared, in middle age, to have discovered

the narcissist within. Now he is elderly,

possibly addicted to anabolic

steroids, allegedly the owner

of gold-plated toilets in a palace

on the Black Sea, perhaps the mafia boss

of his old cronies from St Petersburg,

apparatchiks in expropriation

and manipulation. Certainly he appears

to believe that what a bunch of Varangians

aka Vikings got up to on a stretch

of the River Dnipro more than a

millennium ago must determine

what happens now.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

EXCEPTIONALISM

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

The Japanese Imperial Army’s

mistreatment of POWs

during World War II was a war crime.

The killing of Japanese civilians

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

by the United States Army Air Force

was a geopolitical strategy.

 

Daily, on the tv screen, out of the sky

suffering comes: dust, flames, detritus,

outcries – and the living burdened, fleeing…

 

…Myanmar, Baghdad, Grozny, the fall

of Paris – long lines of people south

on the roads through the fields of the Beauce,

trying to scatter at the siren sound

of a Stuka bomber beginning its dive…

 

…as armies retreat or advance, casual

atrocities, private massacres

randomly uncovered, indicted,

transmogrified if necessary

by statecraft’s convenient amnesia…

 

I used to believe that if there had been

24/7 Live Updates from

No-Man’s-Land on the Western Front

or the VC tunnels in the forests

of Vietnam those conflicts would not have

lasted a week – but now I am not so sure

for someone, somewhere is gaining glory,

telling lies, making money out of this

the simple immorality of war.

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

WHEN THE TIMES DARKEN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

After the Anschluss and Sudetenland,

before the invasion of Poland,

Bertholt Brecht, in exile from the Third Reich

in a thatched cottage on a Danish island,

posed a question in a short poem –

‘When the dark times arrive will there still be songs?’

As poets tend to do Brecht answered himself.

‘Yes, there will even then be singing – about

the dark times that have come’.

 

After the arms manufacturer’s profits

have returned to normal, and democratic

politicians’ have devised new distractions

for their electorates, and cheerleaders

who would send other people’s sons and daughters

to war have found new enthusiasms,

and the defeated have been punished,

the pacifists admonished, the victors

exonerated, and much of Africa

and the so-called Middle East has been unpeopled

by famine, and the world continues

to be consumed by fire, drought and flood,

will there still be singing?

 

 

Note: For a translation rather than an imitation of Brecht’s ‘In den finsteren Zeiten…’ see Edwin Morgan’s: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/when-times-darken/.

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

A FAR AWAY COUNTRY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

When the images caught on someone’s iPhone

of a shelled apartment block in a Kyiv

suburb and a woman sweeping up

shards of glass on a balcony that has

only been partially destroyed, or the piles

of rubble in Kharkiv city centre

that might be Aleppo, Fallujah, Dresden,

change to scorched family cars on littered roads

with snow falling, sometimes on the skyline

are deciduous trees and, clinging

to their leafless branches, silhouetted,

near perfect spheres of mistletoe, ‘omela’

in Ukrainian and in Russian. Each spring,

the mistle thrushes, impervious,

return for the berries.

 

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment