POETRY

POETRY

THE SKY ABOVE

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

From the kitchen door of the holiday let,

down the hill, over roof tops, on a clear day,

are the summits of the mainland’s mountains;

from the front door the gaol’s stone grey massif;

above the cottage’s small courtyard,

where the privy was and now are festive lights

and a hot tub burbling, is a square of sky.

 

Around the corner in Steeple Lane

high in the prison wall is a door,

with rivets either side to hold the scaffold

when it was needed. The condemned cell

led directly to the door. Witnesses

stood in the lane observing the drop,

just up the street from the bakery,

the old chip shop and the Chinese takeaway.

Behind its own high wall on Steeple Lane

the parish church clock strikes the hours.

 

The cottage was built before the gaol.

Hangings then were carried out at Gallows Point,

a low promontory in the Straits

where a boatyard and chandlery are now,

with a view of the peaks of the Carnedd range.

 

On the top of the thick stone walls of the courtyard

are red and white valerians and clusters

of elderberries. The wind tugs at them.

Suddenly, up in the blue, is the roar

of Hawks out of RAF Valley –

and then, in the slow silence regained,

the clatter of jackdaws, the mewing of gulls.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ON LITTLE EYE

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

Only the highest tides reach this small island’s

sandstone rocks. A collar of flaxen sand

surrounds it. A quarter of a mile north

is Middle Eye. A hundred yards further

is Hilbre, habitation of hermits,

custom’s officers, weather stations.

These three are rugged, stony outcrops

in the mouth of the estuary.

 

Leaving West Kirby’s suburban promenade,

we had walked, at low water, to Little Eye

across the Dee’s hard, striated sands.

Westward is Wales, and the redundant lighthouse

at Point of Ayr, and, beyond and looming,

Llandudno’s Great Orme like the dragon’s head

the Norsemen named it for. Here is the earth’s

sweep, our planet’s generous curve and grasp.

 

Nearer, on West Hoyle Bank, a colony

of maybe thirty, forty grey seals

has hauled out, dark shapes only at this distance –

their calls plaintive as gulls’, chesty, guttural.

In the channel between – filling with tide –

two kite surfers skim noisily into sight.

The giant sails swell, billow, with chancy air.

The seals begin to stir. We are tiny

on the arc of the world.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

My granddaughter and I paused before Turner’s

‘War: the Exile and the Rock Limpet’

in the collection of the artist’s work

at Tate Britain, Millbank, beside the Thames.

The exile is Napoleon Bonaparte

on St Helena. He stands – in signature

outfit including the hat – arms folded,

contemplating obscure life in a rock pool.

A guard, musket shouldered, stands some paces off.

The sun rises or sets on a swirling, volcanic coast.

‘Was Napoleon really that tall?’ she asked.

‘Good point,’ I said. ‘I too thought he was short.’

 

We left the Tate by the Manton entrance.

I pointed out the many shrapnel gouges

blitzed deep into the limestone facade

from discarded bombs meant for the docks downstream,

and told her how Rothenstein, the curator,

and his wife had slept for months on camp beds

to act as early air raid wardens.

 

Later I googled Rothenstein – no mention

of wife never mind kipping on a camp bed.

In fact he had arranged for works to be moved

to, for instance, Cumbria and the Marches

after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,

more than a week before war was declared.

I made a mental note to correct

the anecdote with my granddaughter –

and I realised suddenly that

Napoleon would have seemed very tall

from the perspective of a rock limpet.

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POETRY

BLOOMSBURY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2K views

‘O, there you are,’ Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

ULYSSES, James Joyce

 

Joyce read his poems to Lady Gregory

in Dublin. She was impressed and gave him five pounds

to help fund his escape to Paris

from the ‘coherent absurdity’ (his words)

of Catholicism. She wrote to Yeats –

her close friend and patronee, who had lodgings

a five minute walk from Euston – to meet him

off the Holyhead train at six a.m.,

give him breakfast, look after him and then

give him dinner before he took the boat train

from Victoria. She was afraid James

‘would knock his ribs against the earth’. Imagine

these two bespectacled Irishmen,

Orange and Green, very amiably

walking along Woburn Place! No doubt

Yeats introduced him to Bloomsbury neighbours

Eliot and Pound, amongst others,

to ‘help him on his way’. What if James

had torn up his ticket, kept the fiver,

of course, and stayed in this extraordinary

two thirds of a square mile – with its leagues

of floors of books and artefacts,

its revolutionary exiles,

its assorted geniuses, blue plaques,

handsome, greensward squares, cohorts

of multicultural students and tourists?

 

From the window of our budget hotel

we can almost see Yeats’ lodgings.

Before us is St Pancras Parish Church –

in Greek Revival style with terracotta

caryatids and cornices embellished

with lions’ heads. On Euston Road the world

passes – endless pedestrians, black cabs,

red buses. How I longed, as a youth,

to be here – to live and work among these

acres of ideas, the palpable shades

of literary men and women, shakers

and movers in that enduring tradition!

 

Our train passed the same blackened walls

he would have seen – perhaps even the same

stunted buddleia! Not until just before

Bexley did there seem to be some woodland –

or, until after Bletchley, ploughed fields

with murders of crows in the furrows.

We watched a shower of rain move towards us

through the obsolete radio masts

near Rugby, and I thought of James Joyce

creative in exile.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

‘THE CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE’

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2K views

Our present government, unfairly perhaps,

is often caricatured as self-serving,

racist and incompetent – and yet,

with a rather modest investment

of taxpayers’ money, has published

a report which may revolutionise

our study of history, showing

not just the costs but the benefits

to victims of great crimes: ‘There is a new

story about the Caribbean

experience which speaks to the slave period

not only being about profit

and suffering but how culturally

African people transformed themselves

into a re-modelled African/Britain.’

 

After ‘THE CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE’

an ambitious revisionist might write of

‘THE BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE’ – where

half of the ten million were enslaved – then

‘THE REWARDS OF THE U.S. PENAL SYSTEM’,

and ‘APARTHEID: THE BLACK DIVIDEND’.

Next might come three or four new volumes

commissioned under the generic title

‘THE BENEFITS OF GENOCIDE’: as witnessed

in Australasia, the Americas;

by the Armenians; the Uyghurs;

the Roma and the Jews.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

FROM THE TERRACE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

Begun the year of Waterloo, finished

in that of Peterloo, built on rents

and sugar, this – according to Pevsner –

‘modest’ Palladian mansion sits

on a slope, a belvedere. Mature trees

overhang the erstwhile stable block,

now a spa. The hotel is a venue

for weddings – featured in ‘Bride of the Year’ –

and funerary teas, like today’s in sun.

 

From the terrace, and over the ha-ha,

sheep graze in broad fields hedged with hawthorn,

pasture that stretches to sparse, managed woodland.

Beyond, as if added by some British

landscape artist – a Constable, Turner,

Wilson – there is an horizon of low hills

beneath a sky of indefinable blue.

 

We do not talk about the wealth of nations,

about the origins of money,

about enclosures or slavery.

This early evening, after the rites, as if

what we see were not a trick

of the eye, and what we know were not a sleight

of words, we are relaxed about dying.

 

 

 

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