POETRY

POETRY

THE POET AND THE BATTLESHIP

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.2K views

Emperor Augustus exiled the poet

Ovid to Tomis, a Black Sea port

and ancient metropolis, first city

of the Scythian Frontier, a day’s ride

from the Danube delta. Tomis –

in ancient Greek ‘to cut’, ‘to sever’, so called,

Ovid wrote, because Medea, Jason’s

sorceress and lover, dismembered

her brother there, threw the pieces in the sea –

now is Constanta, Romania, renamed

for the consort of Constantine,

and where the mutinous crew of the Potemkin,

after the failed revolution, surrendered

the dreadnought to the Romanian navy.

 

Rumour, however, has it the poet

may have exiled himself from Rome

to this the empire’s then furthest margin,

learning of the Emperor’s prurient wrath

at his Ars Amatoria – ‘Should

anyone here not know the art of love,

read this, and learn by reading how to love.

By art the boat’s set gliding, with oar and sail,

by art the chariot’s swift: love’s ruled by art.’

 

He thought the journey – south through Messina’s straits,

east across the Ionian Sea,

north through the Aegean and the Bosphorus,

tantalisingly past Byzantium  –

seemed to take as long as that of Jason

and the Argonauts. ‘The pine planks thunder,

the rigging is whipped by the wind. The keel

bellows, moaning with my troubles’.

He tells us in his poems from exile –

epistles in rhyming couplets, written

on papyrus, shipped to Rome, to friends,

enemies, and many times to his wife,-

that he fears the barbarians across

the Danube, and complains about the climate

that frequently freezes both river and sea,

and about the citizens of Tomis,

who eschew the toga for Persian trousers,

and mock his Latin. ‘…cano tristia

tristis…sad things I sing in sadness.’

 

In the late 19th century, almost,

as it were, two thousand years too late,

a square was named after him, a bronze statue

commissioned. The sculptor has him pensive,

observing his feet rather than the sea,

not that – compared with Medea’s doings,

and, in Mare Nostrum, the wanderings

of Ulysses and Aeneas,  never mind

the poet’s own modest, bitter travails –

the brief antics of barbarian

sailor boys in stripey jumpers on that

most marginal of seas would have been

of the slightest import.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MAÎTRE JACQUES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

Master James of St George d’Esperance, Savoy –

civil engineer and architect,

a Lutyens, a Vauban, a Speer –

was ‘master of the Kinges werkes in Wales’.

He built the castles at Rhuddlan, Conwy,

Harlech, Caernavon and Beaumaris –

all accessible from river or sea,

the last four with bastides (walled, fortified towns) –

for Edward I, England’s ninth Norman king,

in the latter’s campaign to rob the Welsh.

 

Beaumaris – the final touches unfinished

through lack of funds, and the subjugation

of the Welsh – has two concentric walls,

twenty four towers, and the remains

of a sea water moat and a dock,

all stone work patterned and meticulous.

The inner courtyard is the size of a grand

public square, somewhere for the King to survey,

from a window of the Great Hall – a goblet

of wine from Gascony at his lips,

an English harpist playing at his back –

Maître Jacques command masons and carpenters.

 

We do not know precisely where he was born

or died or when, or much else about him

apart from mentions by various

clerks of work in lists of expenditures –

and that his wife’s name was Ambrosia.

Where they both Savoyards? Did they ever

return? When they saw snow on the mauve mountains

over the Straits from Beaumaris did they think

of the many days’ journey south across

the Celtic Seas to the Bay of Biscay,

along the Garonne to Bordeaux, then by horse

skirting the lakes and crossing the rivers

of Occitania, the Alps of Savoy

in the friendly distance?

 

 

 

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POETRY

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

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

Passengers feel the train brake before they see,

from the embankment above the hectares

of marshes, the landscape begin to slow.

The many acres of grasses and flashes

have snipe, little ringed plover, lapwing,

water shrew, otter – and cattle grazing

at their edges. The River Sow flows

through the wetlands, and, far beyond the town,

joins the Trent, Ouse, North Sea. Between sedges,

low over pools in summer, swallows hunt.

 

We pass under the M6 viaduct,

its traffic relentless, silent above us.

On a low rise is the ruined Norman keep.

The annual Shakespeare festival

takes place with the castle as backdrop.

One of the Earls of Stafford was also

Duke of Buckingham, Richard Crookback’s

ally, implicated in the murder

of the young princes in the Tower.

Shakespeare has Richard, now King, ask the Duke,

– suspecting his betrayal – ‘What’s o’clock?’

 

Lastly Stafford’s two blocks of high rise flats

come into view, and the brick towers

of its nineteenth century prison.

Lesser figures from the Easter Rising,

Michael Collins among them, were held

in the gaol. There is a photo of them,

in civvies, suits and ties, crowded together

on a walkway, taken from below,

Collins fifth from the right at the back.

Someone has put a cross above his head.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A FAMOUS VICTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

Maes Garmon (Garmon’s Field) is on a low

and bosky hillside in a river valley

in North East Wales, and is named for a battle,

from the Dark Ages, that probably

never occurred there or anywhere else –

the so-called ‘Alleluia Victory’.

 

St Germanus, a Gaul from Auxerre, a

5th century career civil servant

and prelate – before he was sanctified,

of course – was dispatched to Brittania

on a mission. Pelagianism was rife,

the belief that there is no such thing as

original sin, which remains one of

the Christian Church’s unique selling points.

 

According to the Venerable Bede

in his Ecclesiastical History

of England, having brought the flock to heel,

as it were, Germanus led the Britons

in battle against Saxons and Picts. With three

alleluias, the heathens were routed –

‘many of them,’ Bede wrote, ‘flying headlong

in their fear, were engulfed by the river

which they had crossed.’ He gave no date or place

for this latter day Jericho miracle

 

An 18th century landowner,

for no recorded reason, gave the battle

a habitation and a date, erecting

on obelisk on one of his fields,

choosing not to question why there would be

Saxons in Wales when they had not yet settled

in England, or why the Picts would march

four hundred miles south to fight with other Celts,

or how even the rump of an army might drown

in a river no more than a yard deep.

Victories are determined by whoever

gets to write them up: priest, gentry, autocrat.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

BLOODLANDS

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.3K views

‘In the very midst of civilised Europe…the existence

of an entire population is threatened.’ Anatole France et al, 1919


 

Ukraine, like all countries, is an invention;

an abstraction on a map; a conqueror’s

caprice; an accident of history;

an actual, continual pit of war,

occupation, partition, rebellion,

displacement, famine – and pogroms

under Chmielnicki’s Cossacks, the Tzar’s

Black Hundreds, the Soviets, the Nazis…

***

Until the Germans occupied Ukraine

my grandfather, a Tzarist refugee

in London, had had regular letters

in Yiddish from his parents and siblings

in Kyiv. After September ’41

no more arrived. Approximately

thirty four thousand Jewish men, women

and children – in two days – were shot to death

by the Germans and their collaborators,

the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.


Each fresh layer of bodies in Babyn Yar –

a ravine four miles from the city centre

and not far from the River Dnipro –

was covered by sand. As the Russians

advanced, re-occupying Ukraine,

the SS attempted to remove

the evidence by exhuming the corpses,

burning them, and scattering the ashes

on neighbouring farmland. Though the odd

piece of bone or necklace turned up, Stalin

ordered the massacre kept secret,

to pretend the retreat had never happened.


***


Before the latest invasion you could

book a tour of the Jewish sites of Kyiv –

the five synagogues, Golda Meir’s birthplace,

Babyn Yar – for less than £50 pounds

per person. Included would be a

selfie with the driver.

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POETRY

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

1816 was the ‘year of no summer’.

Volcanic ash from the Dutch East Indies

darkened Europe’s skies. Mount Tambora,

amid the savannahs of Sumbawa,

had erupted the previous year.

So June 1815 was unseasonably

wet, particularly in Belgium.


Escaped from Elba, Bonaparte had rallied

France, almost expunging Blucher’s Prussians

in Wallonia. At Waterloo,

on the morning of the 8th, Napoleon –

once begetter of Le Code Civil

Des Français before he crowned himself –

waited for the ground to dry in order

to deploy his cavalry to best effect.

However, Blucher’s remnants joined Wellington’s

‘scum of the earth’, and Boney rode from the field

in tears. His ‘critical error’ became

part of the military syllabus.


Add choice and pride to physics and chance

butterflies too can make a right mess of things.

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