POETRY

POETRY

‘THE CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE’

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.2K 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.

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
4 Comments
POETRY

FROM THE TERRACE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K 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.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

APHORISMS AND INDEMNITY: AN IDEA OF AMERICA

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.8K views

For Clive Watkins

 

‘The maker’s rage to order words…’

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST, Wallace Stevens

 

There, as we drove past the Heritage Centre

that once was a medieval  church, on the steps,

among the shoppers and the trippers,

there on a provincial, English street

was a busker with a blue guitar.

 

And I thought of the poem by Wallace Stevens,

who did not drive, and walked to work each day –

from his house on Westerly Terrace

to his office on Asylum Avenue

at Hartford Accident & Indemnity –

composing verses and aphorisms,

jotting them down on a legal pad

for his secretary to type up:

 

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’

The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’

 

The ‘Adagia’ of Erasmus – Ancient

Greek and Latin sayings now become common,

like ‘to die of laughing’, ‘out of tune’ –

inspired Stevens to coin adages:

for instance, ‘God is a postulate

of the ego’, ‘Money is a kind of

poetry’, ‘Every man dies his own death’.

 

He wintered – without his wife and daughter –

in Key West. A tall, heavy bodied man –

nicknamed ‘Giant’ at Havard – he was prone

to Martinis, and had a fist fight

with Ernest ‘Papa’ Hemingway, five inches

shorter, two decades younger, and prone

to Mojitos. Giant, it was alleged,

had sneered at Papa’s literary achievements.

The Ivy League lawyer was felled by two blows

into a puddle. He died, in his bed,

many years later, fully insured.

 

A black and white photo shows Stevens walking

almost jauntily in winter sunshine,

and self-consciously twirling his cane.

Beneath his straw boater he is smiling

circumspectly – as if W.C. Fields

(Mr Macawber in Hollywood’s

‘David Copperfield’) had just fallen

on the softest of times. The comic actor,

who was also rather prone to Martinis,

had opened a savings account in each town

where he toured in vaudeville just in case

hard times returned. All over America

the nickels and dimes gather interest.

 

Somewhere in Missouri or Texas,

Illinois or California,

in his faded denims and his baseball cap,

waiting for a ride beside the black top

is an ageless man with a blue guitar.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

THE TRICKSTER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.7K views

Whether the same crow as last year has returned

or this is a different crow with the same habits

is as much a metaphysical issue

as a zoological one – whichever

is the case the sequence of events

in the Great Lockdown is being repeated.

Early morning the crow flies in, and places

a piece of bread in the bird bath – where blackbirds

have bathed, and robins sipped; flies off; returns

in hours, and snacks on the marinated bread;

flies off; returns, and so on until

the starchy carrion has all gone.

 

Last year baguettes were preferred – this year crusts

with butter and strawberry jam. I watch,

from the kitchen window, the creature

gripping the edge of the diminutive

bird bath – not a sable, obsidian

feather out of place, its neolithic beak

supping fastidiously. We thrive

on patterns me and the crow – it snacking

on throwaways, me making nine, ten,

eleven beats to the line. So is this,

perhaps, some prank from beyond the grave – Ted

Hughes’s Crow mocking my orderly verses?

Or a hoax – the black spot posing as white bread?

 

When I inspect this morning’s dunking –

a triangular piece of garlic bread –

the crow, on a nearby chimney, sets up

such a cawing one would think, in the words

of the old saw, the world was about to end:

when we may perish from surfeit, or from

puzzlement, when earth, air, water are

consumed with plastic particulates,

and small family groups in unnamed deserts

defend their pots of fire?

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

INCONSEQUENTIAL

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

A long section of the grassy bank beside

the ornamental lake is roped-off –

a pair of Canada Geese is nesting,

the first in the history of the Park

with its long-serving Coots and Mallards.

We sit on a bench and contemplate the geese –

almost as big as Mute Swans; adept

colonisers, considered still, after

three hundred years, non-native; this chance pair

perhaps blown off course between raucous lagoons.

 

We are distracted by raised voices

from the opposite bank – three picnickers

on a rug in the April sunshine,

a young woman and perhaps her parents.

Between the murmur of the older woman’s

responses and the man’s rumblings, we hear

occasional words from the impassioned

young woman: ‘…moral compass…out of control…

no time limit…crimes against humanity…

Iraq…Afghanistan…Northern Ireland!!…’

 

At our feet an Ivy Bee – a much newer

immigrant than the geese, landing where Hitler

and Napoleon were expected,

and moving a little further north

year by year – is making a nest in the bank.

Finished it disappears into the earth,

leaving a perfectly circular mound

of grains of sandy soil – a solitary,

relentless labourer, a bee for our times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

OLD EUROPE’S SLOW DEMISE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.7K views

The day King George died they cancelled Children’s Hour,

and filled the evening with ‘solemn music’.

The day his son-in-law died Gardeners’ World

was cancelled, and the corporate ether filled

with hacks masquerading as historians,

historians as hacks, confidently

exuding contradictory gossip, viz.

his father-in-law ‘feared him’, ‘loathed him’,

‘really respected,’ ‘admired immensely’.

 

The Duke was one of the few men or women

remaining who might have thought of the Hapsburgs,

the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs

as family, and knew intimately those

who had witnessed the eagles fall. He was born

a month after the partition of Ireland.

The nights of rioting – by the Queen’s

Loyalist subjects – preceding his death

might have been deemed, at one time, ominous.

 

His was to have been a state funeral –

the flag-draped coffin on a gun carriage pulled

from the Palace by eighty ratings,

along Pall Mall, across Horse Guards Parade,

into Whitehall down to the Abbey,

just the sound of the steel-rimmed wheels, the boots.

Covid 19, if not the great leveller

then certainly a major purveyor

of ironies, well and truly – to use

a fittingly naval phrase – scuppered all that.

 

Though none of the sycophants have mentioned it,

hopefully the Prince appreciated

irony, at, as it were, his own expense.

Having invented the Royal Family

as a media product he appears

to have been appalled by the disrespectful

exploitation of the embarrassed

celebrities he created – and, ersatz

Greek that he was, perhaps remembered

too late Prometheus’s fate. However,

whatever the final sum might be of his

long, privileged life, a very old woman

has lost her friend of more than eighty years.

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments