POETRY

POETRY

PANTELLERIA

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

The Carthaginians had a name for it,

and the Romans, the Greeks – the Arabs too,

Bint al-Riyah, Daughter of the Winds.

This mountainous, volcanic island,

with its stone tombs and obsidian tools,

lies between Sicily and Tunisia,

fifty miles from Agrigento, forty

from Sharik Peninsula – which was called

the Cape of Mercury when the sea

was Mare Internum, Mare Nostrum.

 

Smaller than Manhattan, with fewer people

than Peebles, who speak a Sicilian

replete with Arabic. Among the hot springs

and the fumaroles throughout the lowlands are

round, dry-stone walled gardens made from shaped lava,

built, some say, by the Phoenicians. Baffling

the winds, trapping the heat of the sun, catching

the fogs that rise from the Gulf of Hammamet

and drift across the island, they nurture

lemons and limes and kumquats and oranges.

 

North and south of Pantelleria

triremes passed, and aircraft carriers –

eastwards, in the strong cross currents, on deep,

deep waters small craft with refugees.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

17TH OCTOBER 1961

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.9K views

My first term at Liverpool. Tuesday morning.

The professor of Philosophy’s lecture:

“All metaphysical statements are false,

or platitudinous”. My memory

of that October is of soft sun,

and clement shadows in the breezy

pollution of the river city.

 

***

 

Today, I have realised, that morning,

not quite four hundred miles due south east,

near the Pont Saint-Michel, under orders

from their chief, Maurice Papon, a Vichy

collaborator, police were beating

Algerians demonstrating against

torture, and for freedom. Scores were thrown

into the river Seine, and drowned. Le Rafle –

the Round-up. History as only rumour

for almost another forty years.

 

***

 

Though the world is all there is, and things

have no meanings beyond themselves, the busy

silence of that lecture room, before

the professor speaks, has been broken,

forever, with the cries of the beaten,

and the drowning.

 

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POETRY

THE FOURTH ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2.3K views

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’,

observed Holmes to the astounded Watson,

having noted that the doctor’s face spoke

‘of hardship and sickness’. He had seen action

in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which,

like the First was all about The Great Game

and Russia, and both, like the Third, all

about the British Raj, that Jewel in the Crown,

and Afghan monarchs that might be cajoled

with sufficient treasure or sufficient blood,

while the true rulers, the tribal elders

of the ethnic groups, parleyed with all sides.

 

The Great Game continues, and with new players:

America, China, Iran, Pakistan,

Saudi Arabia. Are Taliban –

who, as some predicted never went away,

but fought a twenty year insurgency –

aka Mujahideen aka

‘freedom fighters’ (to quote Margaret Thatcher),

and the well-funded, so-called Islamic State –

that movable terror, that mobile nihilism –

pawns in the new game,

useful idiots in the exploitation

of the country’s many mineral fields?

 

Those who brought Enduring Freedom chose

not to eradicate polio

but supplied electricity throughout

enabling scenes of havoc and mayhem

to be broadcast on WhatsApp and Instagram.

So, record the lies about Afghanistan –

hypocritical, self-serving untruths,

which ignore the torture at Bagram Air Base,

which prioritise the lives of dogs. Record

that the liars are mostly privileged,

sanctimonious, nostalgic, white

imperialists, some moonlighting as hacks.

 

The Fourth war has masqueraded under

two different euphemisms,

Operation Herrick and then Toral,

and been fought with allies – with Nato,

and the erstwhile Afghan Army and Police –

and achieved no discernible victories,

no battle honours only body bags,

only more of the maimed and the desperate,

only incompetence and abandonment –

against lightly-armed zealots on Chinese-made

Honda motor bikes with a seemingly

endless supply of imported fuel

financed by hectares of exported drugs,

and for whom aspects of criminality,

particularly towards women and girls,

appear a brutal and sacred duty,

in a poor country corrupted with money,

a Ponzi scheme for foreign consultants.

 

Although its capital city, Kabul,

remains the only one in the world

without a railway station, the trade

in opium and hashish has blossomed,

Afghanistan becoming the world leader –

which might have rendered even Holmes speechless.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

HIMALAYAN CHARNEL

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read2.2K views

Though there were rumours for a millennium

the first officially recorded sighting

of skeletons – at more than sixteen thousand feet

around the glacial, Lake Roopkund

in Uttarukhand’s Chamoli district –

was by a border guard in 1940.

The authorities thought a company

of Japanese soldiers had frozen to death

trying to invade India from the north

via Tibet but the bones were too old.

 

There were other hypotheses. A large group –

two hundred in total – of pilgrims

and their bearers, heading to the temples

in the forested valleys of the south,

were caught in a hailstorm with no shelter,

hail ‘like cricket balls’ – a simile

befitting a cricketing nation –

that clubbed to death each man, woman and child.

 

DNA tests show most of the remains

are local, but one is from the East,

possibly Java or Japan, and fourteen

from Crete and Greece  – strayed remnants maybe

from the army of Alexander the Great?

 

The place has become popular with tourist-

trekkers, so much so the authorities

have closed off the whole area. Made

wrong-headed by the altitude, perhaps,

back-packers secreted skulls as souvenirs.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE NATURE OF MEN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.8K views

The organ grinder sets up his pitch at dawn

opposite the Hotel Belvedere Du Mer,

and waits. His monkey, in a sullied red cap

with tarnished bells, scrabbles, beside the corniche,

among the beds of white oleander.

 

The hotel doorman sends a page boy across

with a message and a coin. He watches –

shielding his eyes from the sea’s dazzle –

as the boy speaks to the organ grinder,

who completely ignores him. He returns,

with the coin, embarrassed and affronted.

 

The doorman watches the organ grinder,

who continues to stare, as he has since dawn,

at the drawn blinds and the shut windows

of the hotel’s Seraglio Suite,

where the Prince is dying…

 

We should assume

that all the characters in this story

have names that were bestowed at birth or

in captivity – or have been acquired –

though we will not learn their names. We might

also have assumed thus far in the story

that all the characters are male –

but the page boy is the doorman’s

pre-pubescent daughter with hair cut short,

and the monkey is the matriarch

of a small colony of capuchins

the organ grinder keeps in a deserted

mosque near the docks…

 

There is traffic now

on the corniche, and hurrying workers

along the promenade, briefly curious

about the silent organ grinder,

and his monkey busy among the flowers.

 

A cab stops at the hotel. The doorman descends

to greet the Prince’s prodigal daughter,

whom, we may assume, both has a name

and is the gender she chooses to be.

A low sided wagon passes, carrying

a tethered, blinkered, braying donkey.

 

Suddenly the blinds are raised in the suite,

and a nun opens the long windows wide –

to let the Prince’s soul return to his

vine-covered estates beyond the mountains,

or banish the lingering smell of death,

and replace death’s rattle with the sea’s soft roar.

 

The grinder begins to turn the organ’s wheel,

and along the corniche and through the town’s

boulevards and alleyways the plangent

music plays of Desedemona’s

final aria from Verdi’s ‘Otello’:

‘Hail Mary, full of grace, chosen among wives

and virgins…’ From among the oleanders

the matriarchal monkey emerges,

removes her worn cap and bells, and capers.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A MEMORY OF MUSHROOMS

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

Once upon a time, fifty eight years ago,

I got a bus I did not normally get.

It took me down a street where I had not been

since I was a child. I passed the house –

English farmhouse-style, four-square, low roofed,

the small orchard intact – where we live now.

I noted then how out of place it seemed

in a street of petit-bourgeois villas,

Victorian and Edwardian.

I thought of Tennyson on the Isle of Wight,

after the publication of ‘The Charge…’.

The lane outside his house became so filled

with fans, who had taken the ferry

across the Solent, that he had built

wooden steps and a walkway above the lane,

so that he could go unmolested

each morning into the beech woods, and return

his signature hat in the crook of his arm

brimming with wild mushrooms.

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