POETRY

POETRY

SALMON LEAP

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K 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 read1.9K 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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POETRY

CROSBY BEACH, MERSEYSIDE, 2030

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments2 min read2.6K views


For John Plummer


After lengthy negotiations between

Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council

and Another Place Ltd, the cast iron

statues that comprise the installation,

‘Another Place’, will be removed from the beach.

A third of the statues is completely

submerged. At a high water a third more

disappear, and those, nearest what remains

of the sand dunes, show only their heads.

The hundred figures, all cast from a mould

of the naked body of the artist,

Sir Antony Gormley, will be erected

along the perimeter of a nearby

golf course the Council acquired under

the Global Warming Mitigation Act.

The barnacles, which adhere to the statues,

will in time, it is anticipated, drop off.


A spokesperson for the artist explained

that the protracted negotiations focussed

on which direction the statues would face.

A compromise was reached whereby some would face

south towards Liverpool’s two cathedrals

high up at either end of Hope Street;

some north towards Southport’s hinterland

and the flooded fields of the Fylde’s coastal plain;

and some still westwards towards what used to be

the ambiguous promise of the oceans.


Before the installation of the art work

the beach was seldom visited – unsafe

for swimming, a rudimentary car park

beside the Coastguard Station, no toilets.

The occasional dog-walker might note

the profusion of razor clams, or specks

of coal, scattered among the seaweed, from seams

at Point of Ayr on the distant Welsh coast.

The influx of visitors required

a tarmacked car park and proper toilets –

both frequently inundated now.

The Coastguard Station is on twenty foot piles.


Crosby Beach is seven miles or so

from the centre of Liverpool, most of which

was razed in the May Blitz of ’41.

Much of the rubble was dumped on the beach,

cordoned off from the public throughout the war.

The detritus is so wind-swept and now sea-swept

that it resembles pebbles spring tides have cast –

except for the tell-tale clay of a brick,

a fragment of cut stone.




Note: ANOTHER PLACE – Sylvia Selzer: https://www.sylviaselzer.com/2014/08/17/another-place/

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POETRY

LAKE URMIA

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

In Old Persian, language of the Shah of Shahs,

Darius the Great, whose inscriptions

extend from Persepolis to Egypt,

and from Romania to Bahrain,

this salt lake, greater than the Dead Sea,

was called Chichast, ‘Glittering’ – sunlight

on the undulating lapidary

of myriads of silver particles.

Urmia – Assyrian Aramaic

for ‘City of Water’ – is high above

the lake on a fertile plateau

of orchards, grape vines, tobacco fields.

The city, a millennium ago,

was diverse, cosmopolitan, tolerant:

Christians, Jews, Muslims; Azeris,

Armenians, Assyrians, Persians, Kurds.

The Christians went first – massacred by the Turks

crossing the border. The Jews left for Israel.


Global warming is turning the lake

into an industrial salt pan the ancients

would have envied. Encrusted pedalos

and stranded diving boards in silent

holiday resort towns around the coast

glare like gargantuan rhinestones.

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POETRY

UNDER THE TREES

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

Her Majesty’s Engineers are working hard

with their Polish colleagues to erect

a twenty foot high wall of razor wire

in the Bialowieza Forest –

with its bison, moose, boar, lynx, wolf – the last vast

vestige of Europe’s great afforested plain,

after humankind’s relentless assartment.


This is the forest of the Battle

of Smolensk, the Katyn Massacre,

the Sobibor Extermination Camp.

Jews took refuge among the ancient trees.

Now others are seeking asylum

under the birch and the pine. The wall of wire

threatens all even ‘the fowls of the air’.


Probably before any one of us

had a name, definitely before countries

were imagined, and charts devised, there were

hours, days, weeks of forests of oak and spruce.

The trees lay where they fell. Multitudes

of insects flourished, and saplings grew.

Around the margins scattered people

gathered, hunted, respected everything

even the stones – and watched the brown bears in spring

grazing on the wild garlic under the trees.

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POETRY

THE OLD MEN AT THE LIBRARY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.6K views

There was abundant water from the hills, that once

had been wooded. Under heath and pasture

there were seams of coal and clay deposits

to drive the factory engines and build

the chimneys, which were made by ambitious,

ingenious men for ambitious,

greedy men. The small town became a large town,

and then a city. Tenements were built

for the poor, who had come from hamlets,

at the distant end of tree-lined lanes,

to be less poor. The river, whose source

was in the hills and along whose banks

people had first settled aeons ago,

became, in a decade, an open sewer.


The old men who had become rich because

they owned by chance a lucky piece of land

decided to build a library – leeward

of the prevailing wind – so as to grace

the centre of their famous city.

It would have a Grecian portico

for its entrance, upholstered chairs, and shelves

of mahogany for leather-bound books,

ancient and modern, on all the sciences

and the arts, and the history of the world.


They wondered if a clock were needed –

and then remembered they owned each second.

They had commodified time. What the place lacked

the old men realised – and they were all men,

and only men who owned part of the earth –

was a wind dial so that they might travel home,

after improving their minds, to their mansions

in the foothills, unassailed by acrid

factory smoke and the cloying miasma

from the tenements and the river, but knowing

their fortunes were assured.

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