POETRY

POETRY

HINDSIGHT

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

From Moscow to London, Stockholm to Venice

the world froze at 10, 12, 15 below

for three months. Wine froze in bottles, cows in byres,

and wolves came down to villages scavenging.

Tree trunks shattered. Church bells once rung fractured.

Travellers crossed the Baltic on horse-back,

skaters glided under the Rialto.

 

The War of Spanish Succession was paused

for more clement weather – and regiments

of Swedish soldiers died in Russian blizzards,

ceding victory in the Great Northern War

to Peter the Great almost by default.

(Both Napoleon and Hitler ignored

that hard lesson about Russian winters).

 

Climatologists cannot agree

on what caused the Great Frost: the prolonged absence

of sunspots, perhaps, or volcanic ash

from recent eruptions, Vesuvius,

Santorini. Trade stopped. Hundreds of thousands

perished in a flu pandemic, or starved

to death. Louis XIV ordered bread

be given to the poor. Even the Sun King,

at his new palace in Versailles, felt obliged

to try to save the lives of mere strangers.

 

***

 

In The Gulag Archipelago’s Preface

Solzhenitsyn quotes a peasant proverb:

‘Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.

Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes’.

 

He opens the Preface with an anecdote,

a story he encountered in a magazine.

Political prisoners, from one

of the many Kolyma labour camps

in the Siberian tundra, by chance

dug up a frozen subterranean stream,

with fish preserved in motion for tens

of millennia. The prisoners

broke the ice, ate the fish.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SUN SETTING ON A WINTER’S DAY  

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

Streaks of greyish cloud above the lovat hills

on the far shore attenuate the sunset

with striations of orange and yellow.

For a moment clouds part, and the sun

radiates a shearing silver like some

Turner landscape, or Wagnerian

allegory. And, as if on cue,

with a suddenness that shocks, amazes,

from the hidden lagoons amongst the reeds,

multiple flocks of geese rise calling, flying

towards the river’s mouth, fluttering shadows

receding into dark.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

YOUNG VOICES CONCERT, MANCHESTER, JANUARY 2020

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.8K views

The Arena has become an aviary.

As we walk along the narrow corridor

into the auditorium, the sound

of eight and half thousand young voices

all chattering simultaneously

with wonder overwhelms us like a blast

of tropical heat, like a wall of bird song.

 

The music starts, the house lights go down.

In unison, as they begin to sing

‘Ode to Joy’, each one of the thousands

of song birds switches on a white, bright beam,

which shimmers and waves, glides and twinkles.

 

When the floods and spots permit we can see her,

with the plastic binoculars bought

from a vendor, clearly, among her classmates,

on the far side of the Arena.

Even through lenses she seems a long way off

in all that air – which once more goes black.

The myriad of small beams glows, flickers.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE PRICE OF FISH AND THE VALUE OF NOTHING

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments2 min read2.4K views

When I was a boy I was often taken

to the aquarium on the promenade

by the Palace Pier, Brighton – a resort

and commuter town on England’s south east coast.

It was an hour’s train journey from London

on the Pullman Brighton Belle – with its curtains

and its table lamps – restored to pre-war pomp.

My favourite tank was devoted to sea fish

found in the English Channel – teeming still

from wartime’s cessation of fishing.

There were skate and flounder, dogfish and sole,

mullet and turbot, stingray and dab.

The Channel’s bluey grey waters pushed and pulled

the pebbly beach a bucket and spade away.

 

***

 

Our coastal waters have become the scoundrels’

last refuge, and the continent of Europe

has been cut off from us by a fog,

a miasma of xenophobia

and racism, hatred and envy,

lying and denial masquerading

as patriotism, truth and fact.

Being here at this moment is like

living among a hidden enemy,

aliens disguised as human beings,

a fifth column of racists and xenophobes,

latter-day Platonists obsessed with

abstractions and capital letters.

 

***

 

Piers – their width and length, their cast iron

stanchions and curlicues, the size and range

of their entertainment pavilions, the chance

of swaggering above the briny – were

a hallmark of the best resorts. Brighton

had two – Palace and West, the latter

my favourite as a boy with its small funfair,

green painted wrought iron slot machines,

and glass screens to keep the weather off.

Bankruptcy, neglect, storms, and arson,

over the last fifty years, have left four columns

and the skeletal remains of the tea room.

No one in authority appears

responsible for these vestiges –

which are like some permanent wreckage

of war, a parable of our civic life.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read1.9K views

Her previous enclosure was surrounded

by a wire mesh fence four metres high

and a low hedge, so she was used to seeing

big people from the knees up and small people

with heads only. Now she paces to and fro,

back and fore, in front of a plate glass

viewing window, as if on sentry-go.

We are a yard apart me and this fellow

being, whose shining bronze eyes slide away

each time they see mine. Every ten turns or so

she stops, lowers her head and roars – a sound

so obvious yet unexpected,

so profound, so primordial it

obscures all others, and all thought.

 

Another lioness, her sister, rests

after feeding – as does the lion,

in a statuesque pose, on a faux rock,

concrete made to look like sandstone,

and heated, as if warmed by a tropic sun.

Smaller than African lions, these were hunted

by Assyrian kings, and one had a thorn

removed by Androcles. These three are conserved,

preserved, pampered, even, as if stars

on a movie set, waiting to be called.

Maybe they will breed in their new enclosure

on the edge of the zoo, past the butterflies,

prodigious breeders in captivity.

 

We must seem an eccentric species:

smelling edible but always beyond reach;

a herd that disappears into the night;

standing about in the light, and staring,

forever making inconsequential sounds;

and one or two of us every day

throwing away haunches of raw meat.

 

Beyond the heavy duty outer fences –

built as if bordering a prison yard –

are empty pastoral fields; a canal

built to carry ceramics unbroken

from the Potteries to the Mersey;

ancient woodland; a church with a clock tower,

its foundations pre-Reformation;

and, in the distance, an oil refinery.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

FOOTSTEPS

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read2.2K views

One day, after sunrise – in the time before

the ice sheets began to melt – a girl

or a boy, about twelve, carrying

an infant, walked quickly south with long strides,

stopping once to let the infant walk briefly.

At some point a woolly mammoth crossed their tracks,

and a giant sloth paused to sniff the air.

Later the young person walked back north alone.

 

The muddy footprints fossilised – some ten

millennia ago. The big beasts went,

and the forests that sustained them. Winds

blew white gypsum sands across the prints.

New people came, leaving pottery shards,

and remains of cooking fires. Others came,

following the buffalo from the plains;

others from the south with horses, and guns;

ever more from the east for the gypsum.

Last were those who built high, steel fences

topped with razor wire around missile silos.

 

All remarkable, of course, not least

forensic archaelogy’s calculus,

its calibrations, its storytelling:

across ten thousand years, that journey

of duty, fear and love.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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