POETRY

POETRY

THE BROKEN BRANCH

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

Where the primary school and the houses end

are hawthorn hedges and occasional oaks

on either side of the lane. From the school gates

the leafless trees are an arching, tangled

fretwork – closer each twig is proud, discrete,

vital, sentient. A sudden gust of wind,

or a lightning blow, in one oak tree’s

early growth snapped off a branch, and left an arm

with a claw like a beak. Shut behind the gates

the gradground children have no chance at all

to imagine the stub of a branch a bird,

note the old birds’ nests in the hedgerows,

acorns crushed beneath occasional tyres,

and, whole, nestling in the wintry verges –

or count the first green leaves.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A CHORUS OF ZITHERS

David Selzer By David Selzer11 Comments2 min read2.7K views

The English education system is made

to inculcate compliance – through failure –

with the nation’s stereotyping.

It remains still a work in progress.

For nearly seventy years most learners,

unless they passed an exam at eleven,

would stay in the same council school from four

to twelve, then thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

When I was seven I attended one

of the last such schools, at the end of our road.

There were two entrances with GIRLS & INFANTS

and BOYS carved in the sandstone lintels,

and so two yards – one for spears, one for distaffs!

Whatever the weather the boys would line up.

Once through the doors we would walk single file

through the cloakroom, zig-zagging past each row

of numbered pegs, each row monitored

by a pupil in his final year, who might

already be fifteen, and even shave.

 

That year the movie, The Third Man, was released,

and the theme music played on a zither

became popular on the radio,

and part of the film common knowledge:

Holly Martens stumbling after Harry Lime,

his erstwhile friend, through a dripping tunnel

of shadows and echoes, revolver in hand.

 

One sleety winter day I remember that,

as we were trudging through the cloakroom,

hanging up wet coats – those of us who had them –

one of the monitors began to hum

the zither tune, and the others took it up.

The impromptu choirmaster turned off the lights,

and, smiling in the gloom, not unkindly said,

‘We’re blind in the sewers!’

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ECO-WARRIOR

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.1K views

for Elise Oliver

 

If, when I grow even older than I am

now and were, perhaps, too old to make poems,

I would become a sower of wildflowers.

 

Each year, I would begin with the Narrows,

an ancient path where our street ends –

where children are walked to school, commuters

walk to work, and revellers sway home

caterwauling. Each spring and summer

in the unkempt verges there would be the sight

and scent of Bird’s-foot Trefoil, Kidney Vetch,

Viper’s Bugloss, Common Agrimony.

 

Next I would target driveways that had been

front gardens. Under cover of masking

a cough or saluting an imagined friend

I would scatter Yarrow, Borage, Cornflower,

Common Goatsbeard, Purple Loosestrife, Herb Robert.

 

There is a section of our local park,

between a laurel hedge and cast iron railings,

a glade of Stygian dimness, filled

with modest monuments to the dead.

I would broadcast Field Forget-me-not,

Meadowsweet, Welsh Poppy, Cowslip, Corn Cockle.

 

To plan for when I could no longer shuffle

about the neighbourhood I would recruit

a volunteer band of almost antiques.

I would train them in our back garden

in techniques of broadcasting and dissembling,

and receive their reports, in due course,

on our colonisers’ colours, perfumes,

the roll-call of their names.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

BIRTHDAY GIRL UNDER HOUSE ARREST

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read2.5K views

‘It takes a village to raise a child’ YORUBA PROVERB

 

The rest of us are dressed for January’s

damp chill but she greets us on the driveway in

cool boots, black tights, black skirt, white shirt, and red cloak

Grandma has made for TikTok performances.

She smiles briefly, then gurns. A homemade cake

is brought carefully through the front door,

with candles blazing,  duly blown out.

We sing the song, and mark her eleven years

upon the earth. She is lovely, lithe, and kind.

 

The cake goes back, returns sliced, on paper plates.

Our gifts are unwrapped in the open boot

of the family car – clothes, books, poem.

We are an innovative species –

and stoical. The very lightest of

drizzles begins to fall.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read2.1K views

In a local church hall we wait,  with fellow

ancients, for our first Pfizer vaccination.

Ours is a generation that has received,

since childhood, the blessings of technology

and science. Though the glitter ball

is stationary and the stage curtains drawn

there are shades still of dancing and pantomimes –

and, in the observation tent outside,

the fifteen minutes is quite jolly,

definitely determined. We humans are

social animals, prone to good causes.

 

We drive home in warm, tawny sunlight.

“A lovely day!” you say. “Please sing the song!”

I urge, and you do. ‘This is my lovely day.

This is the day I shall remember

the day I’m dying…’ And, tearful, I see you,

in the chorus, when we were students,

more than half a century ago.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

LOCKDOWN

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2K views

For Fikekahle Dlalisa

 

The casual use of an American

penal term as a figurative cliché

suggests our usual status quo is being

in some sort of custody. In consequence

the clamour of public nonsense rises

about the nature and scope of liberty.

 

Freedom is choice not action. Walking

with a Zulu friend in a busy mall

on the edge of Soweto, “Look,” he said,

“see how people do not crowd each other,

how everybody makes room for everyone.

Our culture teaches us to respect

another’s space”. But this is the land

of ‘can’ not ‘ought’, and of ‘could’ not ‘should’,

of profligate coughs and libertarian

sneezes, and of selfishness unmasked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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