POETRY

POETRY

AS IF

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read674 views

On the end wall of the erstwhile refectory

of the Convent of Santa Maria

delle Grazie, Milan – which is merely

a stone’s row from where a mob of women

mutilated Benito Mussolini

and hung his corpse from a lamp post – hangs

Leonardo Da Vinci’s THE LAST SUPPER.

 

A tourist once asked a guide three questions:

‘These are Jewish men?’ ‘This is the Passover?’

‘So where are the matzos?’

 

 

 

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POETRY

BACK INTO PARADISE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read636 views

‘They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes’.

PSALM 63, VERSE 10, KING JAMES BIBLE

 

Walking through Borough Market one Friday night,

past bagged litter, cacophonous wine bars,

themed eateries, and food waste in gutters,

I saw, trotting across Cathedral Street,

seemingly following the arrow

to the main entrance to Southwark Cathedral,

a fox – heading for its hidden earth perhaps,

on hallowed ground near Shakespeare’s grave.

 

As I made for Borough High Street – a place

of perpetual emergency sirens,

an aimless thoroughfare of dreadful nights,

and my lodgings down a yard lined with fag ends –

I thought of how the diocesan fox

had looked my way as if acknowledging

a fellowship in cunning and survival.

I assumed there was a skulk of foxes

in the graveyard, part of London’s militia

of ten thousand foxy scavengers.

 

I remembered King Lear – who, of course, did not know

how it all would end – repenting the harsh, proud

foolishness of his age, reconciling

with Cordelia, relishing their being

together in prison, finding love at last.

Only fire from heaven, he said, would part them,

and banish them ‘like foxes’. I remembered

Samson, enflaming the tails of three hundred

foxes, and sending them into the fields

of the Philistines to scorch their corn,

their olive groves, their vineyards. And I wondered then

what sort of fervent fire there would have to be

to hound us all – the biblical strongman,

the mad king, the urban fox, and me –

back into paradise.

 

Note: Now re-published in the Winter 2026 edition of Exterminating Angel.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

HARD QUESTIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read655 views

The incense trade route transported frankincense

and myrrh, saplings as well as resin,

aromatic and medicinal,

from what is now part of the Yemen

northwards along the Red Sea coast

and then north east across the Negev

to the port of Gaza and the Great Sea.

It was a twice yearly sixth month journey

for a millennium and a half.

As empires shifted the trade moved elsewhere.

 

***

 

The fabled Queen of Sheba and her

fabulous entourage of courtiers

and of camel trains carrying gold,

and spices, and precious stones,

followed most of the route on her way

to Jerusalem to surprise Solomon

in his royal citadel. She disbelieved

the tales she had heard about the king’s wisdom

and his wealth, and intended to ‘prove him

with hard questions’. He answered so well

that she gave him all of the gifts she had brought.

‘And she said to the king…the half was not told me’.

Perhaps she had just found out about his

‘seven hundred wives…three hundred concubines’.

 

***

 

Dispensing some self-righteous, PR version

of King Solomon’s ‘judgement and justice’,

and each worth considerably more than

any king’s bounty, a ballistic missile

will take ten minutes or so from the Yemen

to Israel and vice versa. Though empires shift,

and death smells of TNT and rocket fuel,

each apocalypse comes with smoke and fire,

and no answers.

 

 

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POETRY

A FEAST OF TRUMPETS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read414 views

We are breakfasting in the small summerhouse

near the high back wall of our garden,

and reflecting on a world where malice

seems at the very end of its tether,

where avarice and nonsense are esteemed,

cruelty applauded, and kindness mocked.

Though autumn has begun, the wisteria

that festoons the south side of this bower

is flowering again, the lilac-blue petals

caressing the window panes. Two bumble bees

like plump dancers flit from flower to flower

in the soft, late September sunlight –

with a robin redbreast in the olive tree,

a red admiral on the ivy.

 

The driest of summers and our brief absence

for two weeks beside the balmiest of seas

shrivelled the plant’s leaves to a papery brown.

We removed them, and watered the roots.

And suddenly the flowers began to appear –

as if the plant’s autumn and winter

had been compressed into merely weeks.

This species was originally from China,

where it still represents a catalogue

of wished-for human conditions – like

prosperity, longevity, love, and wisdom.

 

At dusk the Jewish New Year will begin,

a time of celebration, reflection, atonement,

heralded by ‘a blowing of trumpets’.

According to TikTok this year’s fanfare

of rams’ horns in a Holy Land of

more than usual pestilential

tribulations will bring forth hosts

of Christians anticipating the Rapture,

ready to rise like balloons, and be welcomed

by the god of the three peoples of The Book,

the god of mayhem, havoc, fire, and famine.

 

Meanwhile, as yet, the sky beyond the flowers,

is merely azure, and infinite,

empty of souls.

 

 

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POETRY

THE APPLE ORCHARDS OF BEIT LAHIA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read454 views

‘The Carpet Bombing of Hamburg and Dresden’,

‘The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki’, ‘October 7th

and the War on Gaza’, might be chapters

in a book of moral tales, concerning

human ingenuity and indifference.

 

***

 

After the Pharaohs came the Romans, and later

the Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British.

The orchards remained untouched – fruited each year

abundantly. High dunes protected the trees

from the winds off the sea, the sandy clay soil

nourished the roots, and families tended them,

harvesting each apple as if it were

alive and crystal. Now, in no time at all,

not any time at all, they are gone

under rubble and dust – aeons wasted

of sunshine and nurture.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

AMONG THE MUSES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read959 views

As city ramparts and castle keeps do, so

civic building make statements – like that Attic,

Victorian temple in central London,

that bastion of imperial grandeur,

the British Museum, built to exhibit

stolen goods, and colonise the Muses,

designed by someone with the surname Smirke,

with the profits from coal, steam, and the Slave Trade.

 

Along its entire front elevation,

which includes two wings, is a wide, high

arcade whose open side is supported by

twenty four fluted Doric columns.

In the arcade, at appropriate

intervals for quiet and privacy,

are surprisingly comfortable wooden seats,

ergonomically and otherwise ideal

for ancients on a hot, humid, windless day

in late August London – while family

join the flocks, hordes of visitors to see

mummy cloths, and fragments of clay tablets.

 

The seat we have is probably the best

in the city. Across the courtyard

through the railings are plane trees in full leaf,

and red double decker buses and black cabs

jammed on Great Russell Street – which, like all

the streets and squares in the neighbourhood,

is named for an English aristocrat.

We observe the queue at the main gate –

multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, like London

with its more than three hundred languages,

a rich, ironic legacy of Empire.

 

The Museum – from the Greek mouseion,

‘seat of the Muses’ – is dressed in Portland Stone

quarried by convicts from Portland gaol Dorset.

There is no muse of architecture, nor

of prisoners or slaves, so I shall invoke

Clio, the muse of History, with her

open book and her clock!

 

 

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