POETRY

POETRY

CIA HQ, AFGHANISTAN, 2021

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.4K views

In a compound some two miles square, surrounded

by razor wire and guard towers, on a hillside

three miles north east of the airport and six

from Kabul’s centre, are rows of burnt out cars

and pick-ups. Beneath the vehicles

are solidified pools of molten metal.

Elsewhere in the compound are the ruins

of a mock-up village used to train

operatives to carry out night terror raids.

The recreational block is intact.

Inside are unfinished meals and abandoned

games of chess. The detention block too

is intact. Inmates gave it the soubriquet

‘the dark prison’, the cells having

no natural light – nor electric except

when the torturers came.

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POETRY

DOUBLETHINK

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

‘Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room in the country for two peoples… the only solution [after World War II ends] is a Land of Israel…without Arabs…’ Yosef Weitz, 1940.

At first glance the photo only seems to show

three men standing side by side on a slope

somewhere in Palestine. They are dressed

like professional men, Americans

or Europeans. The one in the middle

holds a map of some sort in his left hand,

and points at something in the distance

with his right. He is Yosef Weitz, Director,

Land and Afforestation Department,

Jewish National Fund. (An immigrant

from Tzarist Russia, a refugee

from pogroms, he worked on the land, something

Jews were forbidden to do in The Pale.

A dogmatic autodidact his vision

was for Eretz Israel to be a country

of forests – perhaps, unconsciously,

like the forested hills of his birthplace).

On closer inspection there are two others

in the photograph: a woman almost

totally obscured by Weitz, except

for the hem of her long skirt and the top

of her hijab, and a man – obscured

almost totally by one of Weitz’s

colleagues but for his keffiyeh.

The Arab stands behind Weitz, and to his left.

Weitz is leaning back as if it is to

the Arab he is pointing out whatever

he has seen. The Arab also holds the map.

Maybe he is trying to be helpful or

maybe the land is his.

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POETRY

‘CHILDREN PLAYING ON OMAHA BEACH’: David Seymour

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K 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 Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.1K views

Before the six counties of Northern Ireland

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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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CIRCUSES WITHOUT THE BREAD

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read2.6K 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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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE ROAD TO THE WEST PIER

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments2 min read2.5K 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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