POETRY

POETRY

DEPRAVED HEARTS: IMPERIAL PATHOLOGIES

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read644 views

Somewhere in our house – built in the same year that

the British-Indian army retreated

from Kabul, and an Act of Parliament

outlawed women, girls and boys under ten

working underground in collieries –

The Boss aka Bruce Springsteen is singing of

‘The Streets of Minneapolis’, a song in that

unyielding tradition: ‘My Land Is Your Land’,

‘Sometime I Feel Like A Motherless Child’.

 

***

 

In Antiquity and the Dark Ages

hundreds of thousands were bought and sold each year.

The city of Venice became an Empire

because of the riches slavery brought.

In the Renaissance and the Enlightenment

ten million were taken from Africa

to the Americas. All were branded.

In Great Britain mill owners and bankers,

monarchs and cotton merchants grew rich.

The word ‘slave’ is from ‘Slav’ – whole communities,

entire peoples enslaved. ‘A’ is for ‘Auschwitz’.

 

***

 

Massacres at Wounded Knee, Amritsar,

and Martyr’s Square, Tehran, for example,

are imperious spasms, the arteries

of kindness hardened by othering;

bridges demolished – in Karaj, Iran,

Mostar, Bosnia, over the Litani

in Lebanon – solely out of spite,

to make burdened lives more burdensome;

the sanatorium assailed in Otwock’s

ghetto, hospitals in Hiroshima

and Dresden, ambulances in Gaza, in Beirut,

to show who matters and who does not.

 

***

 

Patrick Henry, conflicted slave owner,

was one of the two Founding Fathers

who would not ratify the Constitution,

which ‘would give a felon the chance to make

one bold push for the American throne…’

 

And two hundred and fifty years later

a convicted felon squats on that throne

as emperor. However, there might be

some small comfort in the thought that empires,

in due course, as Arnold Toynbee wrote, ‘die by

suicide not murder’.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

REFLECTIONS ON IGNOMINY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read593 views

A freckled, slightly overweight Jewish boy

from Sea Gates, Brooklyn, crossed the Hudson,

and morphed, by dint of patronage and smarts,

into a Master of the Universe,

a digital Professor Moriarty,

a Bluebeard, Svengali, Dr No,

and, for a time, it seems, became the Master –

croesus, pander, spy, rapist, paedophile

 

Just when ‘Nothing To See Here’ had become

almost believable, many thousands

of virtual filing cabinets disgorge

evidence of the actual protocols

of conspiracy – not of a cultural,

ethnic, religious tribe but that

of rich men and rich men’s little helpers,

keeping their wealth safe at our expense.

 

Do only greedy, ruthless men become

mega rich, part of the one percent,

or do the filthy wealthy become

people without pity, their unbound

acquisitiveness demanding brief

rockets to the stratosphere, a town’s

water resources for their AI hubs,

and the despoliation of innocence,

the slaughtering of trust and of hope,

their arrogance broadcast in plain sight?

 

To be clever – and not even try to be good!

To have the means – and not be kind! Must power

always corrupt? Are we only: prey

or predator; Satan, Saviour, Scapegoat;

ignominy’s enablers?

 

 

 

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POETRY

AFTER THE TEMPEST: CALIBAN’S STORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read563 views

Caliban watched the ship sail east. He could see

that the butler and the jester, who used to beat

and mock him, seemed already to be drunk.

Prospero was in the prow of the ship,

and had turned his back on the island.

Miranda, the magician’s kindly daughter,

waved briefly, shyly, surreptitiously.

 

***

 

He had stayed, watching, until the pennant

at the top of the main mast disappeared,

and then had felt suddenly alone, free.

The island became his again, silent

except for the rising and falling of the tides,

and the leaves in summer, and winter’s storms.

Sometimes he thought of his mother sent there

from across the ocean, pregnant with him.

He would dream occasionally of Miranda,

waking, imagine her voice. Though now there was

no one to hear him, he still spoke poetry.

 

***

 

Meanwhile, in Milan, Prospero engaged

a map maker to complete his manuscript

‘Isle of Banishment and Promise’ – and scribes

to make copies for posterity,

and as gifts for his fellow nobles.

In time the map was studied by merchants

throughout Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

 

***

 

One morning, some years later, Caliban

saw a sail on the horizon, and hid.

The ship anchored, and two longboats came ashore.

There were men dressed in steel with swords, and others,

in long black robes, holding some sort of

wooden instrument: a long upright

with a short cross-piece nailed to it – like the one

Prospero had cursed him with. On the deck,

in chains, were men and women weeping.

Their skin was black like his.

 

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POETRY

RESISTANCE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read596 views

A young man approaches as close as he can

to one of Goya’s paintings in the Prado,

‘El Tres de Mayo’ – also known as

‘The Executions of the Third of May’.

Napoleon has occupied Madrid.

A firing squad is set to execute

cowed citizens. A terrified man

in a floppy white shirt holds out his arms

in supplication, horror. Suddenly

the young man begins to sob, a visceral

weeping he cannot control. The young woman

with him instinctively looks round for help.

The other visitors are amazed, embarrassed.

He leaves clumsily, unfocused by tears

he cannot staunch. She follows, desperate.

 

Later, when they have returned home

he tells his story anonymously

to a reporter. He had gone to Spain

with his girlfriend – an art student

researching Goya – after he had finished

a tour of duty in northern Gaza.

The painting reminded him of an event

he had suppressed. His captain shot a man,

unarmed, hands up, pleading.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE MOON’S BACKSIDE AND RELATED MATTERS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read556 views

We speak of the “world being turned upside down” –

thinking perhaps of the earth’s richest,  most

powerful country freely electing as king

a felonious buffoon – but we should think

instead of the world turned back to front

so that, when the earth is spread out

flat as a map, it is not the Greenwich

Meridian at 0 degrees longitude

at its centre but its opposite twin

at 180 degrees, the Date Line.

Then to its left is the West: all of

Australasia, all of Asia,

Africa, Europe, most of Russia,

and a piece of Greenland – and right the East:

all of the Americas, most of Greenland,

and a very small piece of Russia.

So the centre of the world is not

threaded through London but through Fiji.

 

***

 

The rockets are soaring again. Like some

nineteenth century Great Game, China,

India and the US of A

are competing in exploration

and exploitation. People are dying

on earth unnecessarily – from

malaria, hunger, pollution, shrapnel,

blast, torture – and the rockets are soaring,

and obsequious hype fills the ether.

 

***

 

Meanwhile there are plans to rename parts

of the Moon’s posterior – no more

The Sea of Moscow or The Gagarin

Crater – and the plans for the lunar site

of the Acme University

of The Solar System are well advanced

now that the founders have approved the name.

 

After much informed and good natured debate

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk  and Mark Zuckerberg

have agreed that that august institution

on the moon’s rear should be named after

a six letter combination of the

first two initials of their surnames

in descending order of personal wealth – thus

the Mubezu Campus.

 

 

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POETRY

THE SPARROW HATH FOUND A HOUSE

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read877 views

Once – how final and nostalgic that word sounds –

each year we had starlings nesting in the eaves,

and small flocks of sparrows twittering

in the bushes. Though the fluting wood pigeons,

the bel canto blackbirds, the clever robins

and the subtle wrens kept faith, one year

the starlings did not return, and the sparrows,

except for the odd passer-by, vanished.

 

This year the prodigal sparrows have begun

to return – a couple of pairs nesting

in the ivy. They and their offspring

peck nervously at the feeders hanging

from a dead branch of the aging plum tree.

At this year’s end I shall be eighty four.

And at my back I sometimes hear the absence

of the starlings, the skittering  of Death’s

nimble feet, and the sound of soft laughter.

 

***

 

If there were reincarnation I would wish

to return as a sparrow in a five star

hotel with Mediterranean airs;

with palms and olives and weeping figs,

bougainvillea and oleander;

where other birds are focussed on menace

like the hooded crow or stateliness

like the purple herons flying west

or just singing like the gold finches;

where the cat who has made the restaurants

its fiefdom is plump and insouciant,

and sleeps on cushions in the piano bar,

and the other cats prowl ostentatiously

among undergrowth on the margins of the grounds;

to be there preferably in the mid

and high seasons when guests, eating al fresco,

are careless with baklava and feta,

and broadcast sunflower seeds on balconies;

to enjoy the boisterous camaraderie

of meal times and the solitary quietness

as night falls; to hop and to fly as if

the whole world were ours.

 

 

 

 

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