POETRY

POETRY

GUESTS OF LIFE

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.3K views

‘We are the guests of life.’ Martin Heidegger

 ‘In ancient Greek the word for ‘guest’ is the same as the word for ‘foreigner’: xenos. And if you were to ask me to define our tragic condition, it’s that the word ‘xenophobia’ survives, and is commonly used, everyone understands it; but the word ‘xenophilia’ has disappeared…’ George Steiner

 

For Cicero books were the ‘soul of the house’.

The Ancient Romans knew a thing or two

about staying safe in uncivil times.

Nevertheless on his way to sail abroad

the lawyer, statesman, writer, orator

polymath was assassinated

by Roman soldiers obeying the orders

of a vindictive kleptocracy. His head

and his hands were nailed up in The Forum.

Each autumn an affliction of starlings

would swoop above Rome like a chattering net.

Now in the abandoned Coliseum

there are only cats, and the shadows of cats.

 

I watch a neighbour’s cat  – obviously

well fed at home, sleek, sharp-eyed – practising

its instinctive hunting skills in our garden.

Its belly to the ground, it pads forward,

inch by silent inch, then leaps on its prey –

a peacock butterfly opening its wings.

Shocked I almost cry out – but what should

cats know about the absence of butterflies,

or butterflies about the instincts of cats?

But we do – who will risk death to nurse strangers,

and who will slaughter others in a moment.

 

There is no one available now to wind

the parish church clock, whose bells chimed

the quarters and the hours through world wars,

whose hands moved implacably. I can glimpse

the steeple, as I walk the hundred paces

along our garden paths, over the lawns,

across the terraces – where my lovely ghosts

jostle at each turn. I think of house arrest,

self-exile – Ovid, Galileo, the Franks –

note the laburnum’s yellow ringlets

loud with bees, and the wisteria’s sweet

sensuous perfume, the blackbirds nesting

in the ivy, magpies in the snowy drifts

of the pear tree, and consider myself

blessed, if there were blessings to be doled,

having people to love who are living.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2K views

For John Plummer

 

‘History is a people’s memory.’ Malcolm X

 

It is VE Day. Though those who still survive –

the eye witnesses – tell angrily of waste

not sacrifice, what should have been a day

of the dead, and the maimed, and the displaced

worldwide is here one of tea parties, sing-songs –

while the toll mounts as if it were the first day

of the Somme. They lied then. They are lying now –

with entitlement’s clipped inflexions,

with the easy rhetoric of privilege,

the sound of the discrete shibboleths

of power and class, the sound their money makes –

lying about the future and the past,

lying about the sick and the dead.

If you are poor, or old, or brown, or black

you will suffer sooner, and die alone.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

WAITING AT THE GATE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.3K views

On the notice board of the Methodist Church –

on the opposite side of the street

from where I sit at my desk typing this –

is a poster. It is a colour photograph.

In the foreground is a wooden five bar gate.

 

Once I am certain there are no prisoners,

like me, at their exercise – voluntary

exiles walking their dogs in the middle

of the road avoiding others in lycra –

I go over for a closer look. The gate

is shut. Beyond is pastoral land rising

to low green hills. The caption reads: Jesus said,

“I am the gate.” I return and google.

 

Ah, a parable! But King James’ smart divines

have the gate as a door to a sheepfold.

So there ought to be a small flock of sheep,

at least, as well as the bearded shepherd

pour encourager les autres. I go back,

again looking out for cyclists and strollers.

The field is empty but for the odd thistle.

I look carefully at the gate. There is

a weathered sign. ‘Please keep closed at all times’.

 

Later I look up from the laptop.

The ukulele class is surreptitiously

leaving the church hall one by one two metres

apart. On the building’s main roof ridge

there are magpies, an octet, all facing

the same way, teetering in the east wind.

One for sorrow, two for joy…eight for a wish.

I hear them singing each to each. ‘I’m leaning

on the lamp post at the corner of the street…’

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE TEARS OF CHRIST

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

‘He beheld the city, and wept over it.’  Luke 19.41

 

We went up Mount Vesuvius by bus,

and stood on the rim of the crater

watching gases emerge from fissures.

We bought two bottles – a red and a white –

of the local wine, Lachryma Christi,

 for a fellow atheist from the gift shop.

As we walked back down the fertile slopes – the sea

before us, hazy, tranquil – we heard

a cuckoo. All of Campania seemed stilled –

as if it were spring in a lost England.

 

When we visited the ruins of Pompeii

later we strolled wherever we wanted

unescorted, through bars, behind shop fronts,

into decorated brothels – and lounged

beside empty pools in the atria

of the houses of the very rich.

On a sunny April day – the odd sparrow

hopping and cricket chirping, with the gentlest

of winds off the Bay of Naples – among

those tidied, geometrical remains,

the end of days was unimaginable!

 

 

 

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POETRY

A RIGHT CHARIVARI!

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.5K views

All seemed particularly dystopian

as I walked out one morning down the high street,

towards MacDonald’s and KFC,

Café Nero, Costa and Starbucks,

boarded-up shops and charity shops,

and two young men selling the Big Issue.

Maybe it was the noise: the traffic’s grind,

an elderly busker’s cacophonous chords,

the fire engine howling – outside the KFC!

I approached the forming crowd, and overheard,

from customers smelling of smoke, rumours:

that one of the Kentucky Colonel’s

deep fat fryers had exploded into flame,

but the fire had been well doused, and no one harmed –

and I thought of the secret seasoning

of the incinerated chicken pieces.

The bell of the parish church opposite

began the slow toll for a funeral –

like some ironical, adagio

serenade to Mammon.

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POETRY

BANK HOLIDAY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.7K views

The heavy shower drilled on the frosted glass.

We sheltered under one of the high street’s

open arcades with sloping glazed-roofs  –

a Victorian refinement to the resort:

shopping sheltered from seaside weathers.

We were, by chance, in front of Poundland:

one window displayed Pepsi Max, the other

Cadbury’s Highlights, both cut-price sugar.

The Bank Holiday crowd sheltering with us

seemed disproportionately stricken, impaired,

overwhelmingly loud or utterly

silent, with austerity’s complexion.

 

As the rain began to clear a man,

middle-aged, passed using a zimmer frame.

He was engaged in some angry, solitary

dumb show. A woman arrived, high on something.

She had left her whining pug dog tied

to one of the arcade’s wrought iron pillars.

I noted that ‘Punch and Judy’ was to start

on the expansive Promenade, where,

as for a hundred and fifty years and more,

there would be much business with sausages

and Toby the Dog, and Mr Punch

would throw Judy’s baby out of the window.

Only the privilege of good luck perceived

such a continuing farrago of

history and dismay.

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