POETRY

POETRY

ROSEBUD

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.5K views

‘It is the most humble day of my life,’ Rupert Murdoch

 

Beech trees, in full leaf, more than a hundred years

high in the park a street away from here,

rise sheer like raggedy cliffs, a last hurrah

of pragmatic philanthropy – like Rome

before the fall – amid the indifferent

splendour of empire: town halls designed

like palaces, museums like town halls.

It dies spluttering in Flanders mud, choking

in dugouts on Gallipoli’s cliffs.

 

Rupert Murdoch’s dad, a Sydney Sun (sic)

hack, who had the ears, surprise surprise,

of politicos north and south, exposed

Anzac carnage on Ottoman shores,

and brought the boys back just after Christmas –

so doing good through cunning, his means

justified by his goal, the goal always right.

 

As Citizen Kane aka Randolph Hearst –

one of the first tycoons of the gutter press,

war monger, dirt disher, future mangler –

lay dying, “Rosebud,” was the last he said:

a small, wooden sledge, the name in floral white,

his curtailed childhood tangible among the

vast, serried desert of his acquisitions.

 

High above the beeches of St James Park

the Dirty Digger watches from his penthouse

as white pelicans – a gift from Russia

for Charles II, who knew a thing or two

about dads – rise from the lake in the park,

fly towards the Palace then wheel back

over Horse Guards and the MOD,

the birds – their call a grunt and a whine – for some,

a symbol of the Passion on the Cross.

The Breaker of the English-speaking world plots

what lie he will tell Death.

 

 

Note: the poem has subsequently been published in EAP: THE MAGAZINE Winter 2012: Errors of the Gods – https://exterminatingangel.com/rosebud/

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CONFUSED ALARMS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.7K views

One of my favourites poems is Dover Beach.

I read it first at school when I was fifteen.

It seemed a fine thing to have written –

evocative, erudite, sonorous,

personal. Matthew Arnold, the advocate

of ‘sweetness and light’, honeymooned abroad

the year of the Great Exhibition.

Returning to England they stayed the night

at the Lord Warden Hotel – before taking

the train to London – no doubt to recover

from the paddle steamer that ferried them

across the English Channel, a craft,

though independent of the wind, tossed

by the waves, whose swaddled passengers travelled

au dehors. The poem begins ‘The sea

is calm tonight.’ From his window he can see

across to the French coast where a light gleamed

briefly. He calls his wife to his side,

and they listen to ‘the grating roar’ of the tide,

the unceasing waves shifting the pebbles.

 

For Arnold Great Britain was not the land

of ingenuities the Crystal Palace

hymned but of Blake’s dark factories. ‘…the world

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…’

What would he have thought of us who measure

this country’s wealth in Costa coffee spoons,

eschew the Europe whose cultural heritage

is ours, make dishonour a virtue,

and still send tens of thousands of children

hungry to shared beds in inadequate rooms!

‘And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.’

 

 

 

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POETRY

ON BENLLECH BEACH 2020

David Selzer By David Selzer8 Comments1 min read2K views

We have moved once to accommodate the tide

on this August strand, crowded with many

who otherwise would have been in the Algarve

or on some island in the Aegean.

At least the sands are free this year of the Christians

whose jocular misanthropy of games

of tug o’ war takes up so much space.

 

High tide is still nine minutes away,

and the beach here rises just perceptibly –

but ramparts have gone, and a castle keep.

Someone has placed a child’s spade in the sand

guessing where the flow will end, the ebb begin –

or knowing it will be so, for the sea turns

just as it laps against the blue blade.

 

We are so pleased watching the waves recede,

as if we had outwitted them, outlived them

almost, we do not notice the spade has gone,

its modest owner emulating Canute.

On the horizon, anchored until high tide,

container ships and tankers are moving now

safe to cross the Bar, and sail into the Mersey.

 

Curious to face the sea as if facing

the future. Though the waters surge and swell

with many metaphors, for the most part

only the inevitable happens –

like the wave, the invisible tsunami,

that will strike these islands’ shores this coming

New Year’s Day. Something the hateful, the greedy,

and the ignorant have willed – for a chimera,

a mere abstraction.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE NET

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

At the edge of the waves, as the tide flows

and the beach is gradually deserted,

a young woman wearing a hijab,

dressed for a rainy day at the seaside,

watches, concerned, as her grandfather,

a perfunctory beard on his long

Mughal chin, smiling, with horn-rimmed glasses,

in his Ralph Lauren green and white polo shirt,

trousers rolled high, up to his knees in water,

using a Kashmiri technique he has seen

on YouTube, casts – into the sky – a weighted,

conical, fishing net he bought online.

Its silver mesh scatters over the sea.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MAM CYMRU

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

The purple, jagged rocks on the island’s shore

were molten lava from volcanoes –

mere craters for aeons now – across the straits,

and limestone boulders in the hinterland

the slow detritus of the last ice age.

 

RAF Typhoons have flown from their air base,

ten miles or so from here, every day,

leaving the island with their stormy thunder,

over the mountainous Llyn Peninsula

out into the north east Atlantic,

as if it were quite another sea.

 

This island was Mam Cymru, the granary

of Wales. Its ubiquitous, redundant mills

are unmarked monuments to a past

bountiful, precarious, and brutal.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE PICNIC

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.6K views

At the end of a dull August afternoon,

two little girls, sisters perhaps, in hijabs,

and a stocky boy of ten or so,

and two women, probably their mother

and grandmother, dressed in woollen hijabs

and abayas, are preparing to picnic.

They lay out a tartan rug, and Tesco bags,

on that part of the Green closed to vehicles:

between the low stone wall – beyond which

is the narrow walk along the sea wall,

and occasional notices of bye laws

strictly prohibiting the feeding of gulls –

and the small standing stones of the eisteddfod

from before the war. The coach parties have gone,

so they must have driven here – where few

pass through on their way to somewhere else –

along the winding, bosky corniche

beside the Straits. They sit on a tartan rug,

and share the foil packets from the bags.

The boy notices a seagull waiting near,

and asks if he may feed it with a crust.

The younger woman gestures as if such things

were bountiful now. He leaves the rug,

and throws the bread to the bird, which gobbles it

cautiously. His sisters ask for crusts

to join the boy. Almost immediately

the grass is covered with a flock of

seemingly frantic wings, a maelstrom

of dark grey and white, a turbulence

of harsh, jeering cries. The children flinch,

then run to their mother who gathers them in.

The grandmother, putting food and drink

to one side, pulls up the tartan blanket,

charges the gulls, waving the rug like a flag.

The flock rises silently – then settles

behind the standing stones… ‘After the battle,’

sing the bards, ‘after the battle, hearths

are desolate, birds gather, a woman keens…’

 

 

 

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