POETRY

POETRY

PHILLIS WHEATLEY: 1753-1784

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.8K views

Enslaved in the Gambia or Senegal,

scholars surmise, she survived the nauseous

and violent bottom line of the

Triangular Trade to be bought aged eight

as a maid for his wife by John Wheatley,

merchant and tailor of British-ruled Boston,

a known progressive in education.

 

She was christened ‘Phillis’ after the slave ship

that took her childhood. She was prodigious,

and was removed from domestic duties.

Tutored by his daughter, at twelve she knew

Latin, Greek, the Bible and, later,

became a true genius of Augustan

couplets – their wit, their beat, their certainty.

With her master’s son, she went to London,

where her poems were published to some acclaim.

Her encomium to George Washington

was re-published by Thomas Paine. ‘Proceed…

A crown,  a mansion, and a throne that shine,

With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.’

 

Ah, how we tolerate unflinchingly,

unthinkingly absurd and absolute

contradictions – freedom and servitude,

enlightenment and doctrinal dogma!

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.’

 

On Wheatley’s death she was freed – all that his will

left her: liberty without means. She married

a free black grocer. They lived in poverty.

Two infant children died. And yet she wrote –

but without white, male or titled patrons

was unpublished. Her husband was jailed for debt.

She supported herself and her sickly son

as a scullery maid. One December day

they died in squalor, were laid in unmarked graves.

 

What did she choose to remember of the seas

pounding against the timbers, and the cries,

and the chains days after days after days?

Or the drums into the night; or the smoke

from the cooking fires at dawn; the bright clothes;

the songs; her mother’s voice?

 

 

Note: The poem was first published on the site in July 2015.  It is published here with minor amendments.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read2.4K views

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – tale

of adultery and obsession –

was published in 1850. In the year

the Crimean War began, he became

the U.S. Consul in Liverpool,

a post gifted by his friend the President.

He did not like the job despite the fees

from the cargoes of cotton and molasses

hoisted ashore. Whether in a Hansom cab

home to his family in lodgings in the town,

on the steam ferry to the rented villa

in the gated park on the Wirral,

or on the train to the rented house

on Southport’s Esplanade he felt too close

to the piratical-looking tars,

who washed up on the consulate steps.

 

His friend, Herman Melville – whose Moby Dick (tale

of arrogance and obsession) was published

in 1851 – had once been

a young sailor lost in the town’s quayside stews.

When he and his family did the Grand Tour

they set off from Liverpool, staying a week

with the Hawthornes in Southport. One evening

the writers took their cigars among the dunes

and, facing west across the twilight waves

of Liverpool Bay, spoke of providence,

eternity. Courageous innovators

that they were, no doubt each secretly,

that night, thought the other might have penned

the supreme fiction of their elusive land.

But the dark fields of the Republic

were rolling towards them – Little Bighorn

and Wounded Knee, Shiloh and Gettysburg.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE SORES OF WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

‘…sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments…’ TWEET, President Trump

 

In a letter to the New York Times three years

before the war, General Robert E. Lee

described slavery per se as ‘a moral

and political evil’ and, in the States,

‘a greater evil to the white man’

than the black. In 1857 Lee

had been his father-in-law’s executor.

George Custis had manumitted his slaves

on his death bed there and then but ‘no white man

was in the room’. Lee promised them freedom

in five years. Three escaped but were caught.

The plantation’s overseer refused

to whip them. The local constable agreed.

They were stripped and lashed many times –  the men

fifty, their sister twenty. ‘Lay it on well!’

the General ordered. After the war

Lee refused an invitation to join

senior officers from the Blue and the Gray

at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg

to mark key moments with granite monuments.

‘I think it wiser,’ he replied, ‘not to keep

open the sores of war.’

 

 

Note: The poem was first published on the site in November 2017.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE COLSTON BUN

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2.2K views

‘And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.’ DEUTERONOMY 12.3

‘Black deaths do not have a good press, especially when they occur in the custody of our custodians. The media leads the public to believe that our guardians can do no wrong. Racism leads them to believe that blacks can do no right. The silence of the custodial system is compounded by the silences of racism.’ DEADLY SILENCE: BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY, Institute of Race Relations, London, 1991

 

Anger, one Sunday in June, overcame

decorum in that diverse city,

and – no doubt, inspired by the toppling

of other graven tyrants – righteously

pulled down the effigy, with a thump of stone

and a hollow gong of metal, and tossed it

from the quay into the harbour waters.

***

The Royal African Company received

its charter from Charles II and James,

his brother, hence the US east coast seaports

Jamestown and Charleston. It was established

by the restored royals to provide them,

free of interference from the Commons,

with their own spending money. Board members

included the philosopher, John Locke.

The company’s profits came mostly

from enslaving West African men, women

and children, and transporting them across

the North Atlantic’s turbulence. More than

two hundred thousand were taken, and nearly

fifty thousand died on the journey,

the firm’s double entry bookkeeping shows.

 

One prominent member of the board

was Edward Colston, a Bristol merchant,

the city from whose harbour the slavers sailed,

and which, in due course, would make chocolates

and cigarettes. His philanthropy

inveigled the streets like a bad conscience,

almost a rebuke of victimhood:

his name on a hospital, a school,

a bun flavoured with dried currants and allspice

topped with sugar, given to the poor yearly

and still made for sale by local bakeries –

and himself looking thoughtful in bronze

with a periwig and a walking stick.

 

Apologists who claim he was merely

of his time, an accidental racist,

and collateral ethical damage,

like Henry Wills and Elizabeth Fry,

should remember John Locke, his damascene

moment unrecorded, who threw his shares

into the fire. ‘Slavery is so vile and

miserable an estate of man …that ’tis

hardly to be conceived’. That June Sunday

civic anger overcame decorum.

 

 

Note: The above is a revised version of the piece originally published on 25.6.20. The revisions are the result of e discussions with a regular reader, Elise Oliver – please see Comments.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CONTAGION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

‘O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe,  and will look upon our testimony as a fable.’ Francesco Petrarch

 

Somewhere near the estuary of the Don,

with its mudflats and meanders, north

of the Sea of Azov, and somewhere

near the Volga Delta, with its pelicans

and flamingos, north of the Caspian,

on the steppe lands are black rats and fleas

and yersinia pestis. The rats

like human warmth, and the fleas can leap.

 

The Mongol khanate of the Golden Horde,

recently converted to Islam,

had closed the Silk Road for religious reasons.

Italian merchants in Kaffa, Crimea,

notwithstanding held their fort. The Mongols

besieged the Christians and, withered by the plague,

so it is said, threw the corpses of their dead

over the ramparts. The merchants decamped.

 

The bacterium was borne along trade routes –

in holds of ships and folds of clothing.

In eight years the Black Death killed fifty million.

There was collateral damage – in Strasburg

and all of Rhineland the burning of Jews.

It probably brought about the end

of the feudal system, and undermined

the Pope’s domination, making the world

free for capital, enterprise and invention –

like mariners’ astrolabes, matchlock guns,

the Atlantic Slave Trade.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE TOP OF THE RISE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

For John Chapman

 

I can see for miles across the wolds, low hills

receding. The top of the rise is a field

of stubble that was rape. I imagine

last year’s sweet scented, false meadow of sharp

yellow and green. On the field’s far side

a flock of wild geese is grazing the stalks.

The cloudless, cerulean sky, empty

of con trails, seems closer, domed, as if curved

like our planet. In an ancient copse,

below the rise, a woodpecker drills.

The silence that follows, the stillness,

is of another, imagined time.

 

As I walk down the slope past the copse,

a wild deer, a hind, is drinking from a pond.

I stop, awed. We are, at best, irrelevant.

The margins of the arable field

may revert to nettles, the rest grass from which

a rising lark may sing.

 

 

 

 

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