POETRY

POETRY

‘CHILDREN PLAYING ON OMAHA BEACH’: David Seymour

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.5K views

The war is two years over. The tide is out,

and the beach clear of detritus except

for part of an upended landing stage,

like a leviathan’s jaw, in a pool.

Beside it there are four small children,

who are playing the serious, absorbing games

the very young play with wet, fugitive sand.

The photographer, whose parents were murdered

by the Nazis, was killed by machine gun fire

near the Suez Canal. He photographed

Ingrid Bergman with a dove, and Picasso

with ‘Guernica’; covered the Spanish

Civil War, and the founding of Israel.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

NO SURRENDER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

Before the six counties of Northern Island

had civil rights, when some subjects had two votes

and some had none, and our constitution

permitted such injustice, I was woken,

in my third floor student digs on Newsham Drive,

Liverpool, early one summer Saturday

by pipes and drums and accordions.

The city’s Orange Lodges were having

their family day out in Newsham Park –

more than ninety Lodges each with a band

of swagger and lilt: ‘The Sash My Father Wore’,

‘The Orange Maid Of Sligo’. By mid-day

children and wives were picnicking round the Parks’

two boating lakes – the bandsmen aleing

in and outside pubs along West Derby Road.

Through the afternoon there were intermittent

outbreaks of song: ‘…the shutting of the gates…’,

‘…when you’re marching down the Shankill…’. Later

the soft night swooned with swaying revels, stray notes,

oaths, and the hollow noise of empty bottles

rolling on pavements.

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POETRY

CIRCUSES WITHOUT THE BREAD

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read2.3K views

We are told by a Minister of the Crown

that the ‘death toll is mercifully low’,

that we must ‘learn to live’ with the pandemic.

We are a mature democracy but

allow ourselves to be treated like infants.

Though his writ runs only in the largest part

of these unequal, disunited kingdoms,

his pronouncements dominate the media.

He is the son of working class Pakistani

immigrants. A banker by trade, his vowels –

though not those of one who would have ordered

“Over the top!”, while brandishing a pistol –

have been completely shorn of his past.

He is a trimmer led by a trimmer –

that sinister clown, that jovial

sociopath, that idler, that sponger –

leader of a circus of distractors,

of seedy rhetoricians, of swindlers,

that extols the charity of food banks.

The coterie seems to be kept in power

by a clique of greedy, threatening, snobbish

xenophobic, racist parliamentarians,

obsessed with the zealotry of abstractions –

‘freedom’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘culture’ – but all merely

servants of the corporate masters

of the universe, who have already

acquired their gated Ararats, and designed

the manorial space stations to which they may

need to repair. Meanwhile, liberty,

we are told, must be measured in Starbuck’s

coffee cups and Wetherspoon’s cheesy chips.

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POETRY

THE ROAD TO THE WEST PIER

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments2 min read2.2K views

‘Everyone who knows the meaning of poverty, everyone who has a genuine hatred of tyranny and war, is on the Socialist side, potentially.’

George Orwell, THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, 1937

“We have closed the door…to anti-Semitism in the Labour Party…We have turned our back on the dark chapter.” Kier Starmer, Labour Party Leader, MIRROR, 27th September 2021

‘Britain deserves better than this incompetence and total lack of leadership.’ Kier Starmer, Labour Party Leader, THE SUN, 2nd October 2021 

 

A photo was released to the media

with a copy of his conference speech.

The Leader of the Opposition, tieless

but dressed in dark suit and white shirt to show

he does not overdo formality,

is standing on a hotel balcony,

with his back to the sea, perusing,

presumably, the speech but looking as if

it is a summons he has received. The salt air

is beginning to rust the wrought iron railings,

and, behind him, unnoticed, presumably,

by all, including his aides, masters

of the unintended metaphor,

fifty yards or so out in the Channel,

the remaining girders of Brighton’s West Pier

destroyed by fire, left like a wreck in wartime.

 

The party of Kier Hardie, Nye Bevan,

Jeremy Corbyn: tilting at imagined

anti-Semites; purging like Stalinists;

dressing up in Tory old clothes; ignoring

the room with the elephants, Afghanistan,

Iraq; revering the egotist,

and his acolytes, that took us to war –

a party in a divided land

at rancorous, self-destructive odds

with everyone of its next door neighbours;

where the mainstream media is complicit

in the nakedness of straw Emperors,

in their mendacity; where misogyny,

xenophobia, racism thrive;

where poverty knocks, knocks!

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

STERKFONTEIN CAVES

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.2K views

For Sizwe Vilakazi

 

An hour’s drive or so from Johannesburg

and Pretoria are limestone caves,

a depository of fossils,

a chance ossuary of hominids,

the so-called Cradle of Humankind, owned

by Witwatersrand University.

 

Our guide, the first time we visited, was Arnold,

a young man in his twenties, who had lived

all his life near the caves, and whose ambition,

since boyhood, had been to be a guide.

He showed us a pool and its blind reptiles –

which, he said, if brought to the light, would see.

 

Our second visit, seven years later,

World Cup year, the clapboard visitor centre

had been replaced by plate glass and videos.

A white, nameless, archaeology student

showed us around. In the very depths of the caves,

he turned off the lights – so that we might

“experience the dark our ancestors knew

more than three million years ago”.

And I thought, in that pristine blackness,

for a brief moment before fear took flight,

of a history, a topography,

a geology of ironies.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

WHITE PLAINS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

My first time in Manhattan I was amazed,

walking down Madison from the Park.

Yellow cabs and subway trains from A to Z

I knew – but there were buses, a plenitude,

most seemingly destined not for The Bronx

or The Bowery but White Plains.

My ignorance pictured some far distant place,

almost Arthurian, in the Mid-West,

from where travellers might never return.

 

This was the city of Sipowicz,

Homicide Detective and Everyman;

of lives wasted in the garish, pulsing streets,

in the brownstone apartments of the rich,

the challenged, and the modest; a city

of small victories for humanity,

of humble, humbling journeys of the soul.

 

This was the city of, at least, one

genius on every other corner.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born

on Riverside Drive. Enrico Fermi,

exiled, researched at Columbia.

 

Albert Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt

tick-tocked in a safe in a skyscraper,

opposite City Hall, where five thousand

civil servants clocked-in covertly.

The uranium was warehoused near the port.

Brighter than a thousand suns, the bomb’s fulgent,

multitudinous clouds wasted what they touched.

 

White Plains is a suburb twenty miles north

of mid-town. There is a Bloomingdale’s,

a Macy’s. It occupies earth bought

with beads by immigrants, who named it

for the groves of white balsam they felled,

the river mists drifting.

 

 

 

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