POETRY

POETRY

STERKFONTEIN CAVES

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.4K 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had been replaced by plate glass and videos.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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POETRY

WHITE PLAINS

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

PANTELLERIA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K 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 read2.1K 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 read2.5K 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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POETRY

HIMALAYAN CHARNEL

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read2.5K 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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