POETRY

POETRY

A SORT OF KADDISH

David Selzer By David Selzer9 Comments1 min read2.4K views

Today, entering the house from the garden,

I turned, involuntarily, to look back,

but saw nothing more than what is always there,

small rooms of eclectic evergreens – olive,

camellia, rhododendron, bay –

and, for some reason, I thought of my father

dead for almost as long as I have lived.

 

I have shuffled what I know of him

like a pack of cards in a game of patience

for a lifetime – would he approve, be proud,

that twenty six year old secular Jew

from North West London, a personable

young man by all accounts, whose friends were artists?

 

As I grew old enough to be his father,

and then his grandfather, I began

to think of him less and less with longing,

but always as my loss, and my mother’s,

when she lived, and his family’s – and my loss

had as much to do with a heritage lost

in that pack of cards as with lost love.

 

Today, I thought, for the first time, of what

he had lost – of all those years never known,

of all the sweetness of being alive –

and hoped, as he lay dying from sepsis

four thousand miles from those he loved,

he became too delirious to see

what he would never know.

 

 

 

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POETRY

FROM A BALCONY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K views

A flock of goosanders fishes in the Straits,

as ubiquitous oyster catchers whistle

on the shore. In the early evening

the air about our balcony throngs

with birds – swallows whispering, swifts screeching,

two ring-necked doves cooing in the clematis,

and a small flock of sparrows chattering

below – as the last sun shades the mountains

opposite. By night three fishermen

make their profaning way along the pier

with swaying torches. The seeming darkness

above the peaks is thronged with unnamed stars

we cannot see, and their imagined,

and fabled harmonies.

 

 

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POETRY

THE MOLD CAPE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.3K views

In what is now the back garden of a house –

a between-the-wars semi – in Mold, a town

in North East Wales, a gang of labourers,

one hundred and seventy years ago,

hired to demolish a burial mound –

known as Bryn yr Ellyllon, Goblin’s Hill –

uncovered what seemed to be small sheets of brass

on a small, fragmentary skeleton.

Cleaned, fitted together, a local scholar

declared them a Bronze Age cape of gold,

perhaps made to fit a royal child.

Since then the cape has been exhibited

in a glass case in the British Museum.

Imperial kleptocracy at work.

An artefact of such exquisite design

and craftsmanship could not have been allowed

to remain in a small market town where most

did not speak English, and were illiterate

in their own language. It was a place ringed

by the mining of iron, lead and coal;

a place where a riot about workers’ rights –

a reduction in wages, and miners

forbidden their mother tongue underground –

required four rioters to be shot dead

by soldiers of the King’s Own regiment.

After the discovery the mound was

completely razed. No record has been found

of the disposal of the bones.

Note 1: Ellyllon is pronounced ‘ethleethlon’

Note 2: The poem has been published in the 2022 winter edition of EAP: The Magazine – https://exterminatingangel.com/the-mold-cape/.

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POETRY

SERMON ON THE MOUNT

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

The plaque has been placed high onto the front wall

of a terraced house in the street next to ours –

and is, in effect, a terracotta tile,

roughly a foot-and-a half by a foot,

with a raised border, and lettering

and numerals probably executed

by a gravestone mason, who maybe lived there.

The date inscribed is 1872 –

the words, first in English and then in Welsh,

‘Blessed are the meek. Matthew V.v’.

 

When the railways came in the 1850s

bringing the London-Holyhead line,

the station became an important one.

Chester was a garrison city,

and Ireland always needed pacifying.

Where we live now was developed

to house the families of working class

skilled men and lower middle class clerks

in exclusively rented accommodation,

which makes the plaque a surprise: not its faith,

nor its grave taste, nor its erudition –

the railway junction attracted migrants

over the border from the poverty

of North East Wales – but that mere tenants

should have had the courage to declare their right

to a place in the world. That, on reflection,

was perhaps the point of the Beatitudes,

and whoever it was who crafted them.

 

 

 

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POETRY

NEXT YEAR

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

Wild bees have occupied the swifts’ nesting box

sparrows colonised last spring and summer.

The sun casts fleeting, waltzing shadows

on the white walls of the house – males and queens

at their love-making. A carrion crow

with a chunk of bread in its machined beak

alights on the rim of the bird bath

as if from some dark play. It dunks the bread.

Over in the west the sky is ivory

through a break in the clouds. A box, and a bath,

concrete and wood, and the sun – how the future

is made: next year swifts maybe, and the wild bees,

the carrion crow, us.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE NETHER PORTAL

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2.2K views

Fifty years ago the garden of what is now

our house was five times its present size –

a garden that had been a field, and a heath.

A builder turned an orchard, borders

and most of a lawn into three modern

terraced houses and eight lock-up garages.

Part of what remained of the lawn was a dump.

 

Occasionally odd things still turn up –

like bits clinker, rusted iron, and, today,

a small piece of coal, of anthracite,

its planes and angles glinting like lightning

in the blackest of skies as I hold it up

to show my ten year old granddaughter.

‘What’s this, do you think?’ ‘Obsidian?’ she says.

‘It’s coal,’ I say. She looks at the geometry

of its blackness with the wonder I would feel

if I were to see obsidian. Seeing

my face she helps me with my homework.

‘It’s black volcanic glass. And in Minecraft

the Nether Portal is made from it.’

 

Plato maintained that the structure of the world

was cuboid. According to the elder Pliny,

Obsidius, an explorer, discovered

the sable glass in Ethiopia,

and was impressed by its sharp rectangles.

Stone age peoples made it into arrow heads,

who maybe believed in that portal,

through which Persephone and Orpheus

separately, reluctantly, descended – each returning,

one with glory, one with remorse. And I think

of the others, unnumbered, getting the coal

this child of the future has marvelled at,

coal that has set fire and water at odds

to envelop the world, rendering it

all desert or ocean.

 

 

 

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