POETRY

POETRY

THE BANDED DEMOISELLE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.9K views

If Ezekiel’s watchman, or, rather, God’s

had been on the job there would have been

some sort of heads-up – a cornet perhaps

if not a fanfare – that the Parish Church clock,

put in place in 1867,

would be chiming again, hours and quarters,

this summer morning. But it just happens –

almost surreptitiously, like some

member of the chorus in an opera

sneaking on late from the wings. And late it is

by a few minutes – as before it was fast.

 

Such churlishness, some would say, is tantamount

to treason – as the Prime Minister

of one of the earth’s richest countries,

though singlehandedly it seems fighting off

phalanxes of invisible foes, finds time

to fly to the Orkneys for a photo-op

with a couple of large crabs on the deck

of a trawler in Kirkwall harbour,

and speak with officer-class passion about

the abstract benefits of the Union –

the English monarchy’s first colonies –

whose strength has helped us through…and will again…

 

As Benjamin Franklin – who chased lightning,

with an iron rod, on a horse – once said, “Tricks

and Treachery are the practice of fools,

that do not have brains enough to be honest”.

And I recall that the name of the church –

built in local sandstone for a burgeoning,

provincial bourgeoisie – is All Saints,

so no bases or bets left uncovered there.

Nevertheless, when I hear the chimes

and watch my live-in gardener – whom

I have loved for nearly sixty years –

building a rockery in assorted stone

with alpines and lavender, there is some sense

of re-setting if not re-winding the clock.

 

Suddenly, out of the purple buddleia –

an import from China, nationalists

should note, that self-seeds particularly well

in ravaged, industrial wastelands –

a dragonfly appears, metallic green,

with fluttering wings, translucent, pale,

and disappears somewhere beyond the hosta

and the agapanthus. I learn, instantly,

it was a female banded demoiselle,

its habitat slow-moving muddy streams.

 

Beneath the garden and the house – a fort

against the dark – was a pond and a brook

speculative builders filled with rubble

more than two decades before the church was built.

That fragile creature of breath-taking beauty,

like a prophetess, divined the lost waters.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CIRCUS

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

Days after we had travelled east of Eden

we invented clowning and slapstick,

juggling and tumbling, magic and music,

and idleness to ease our banishment

from Paradise. So, for ninety minutes,

in this rare and aerial space of changelings

and kaleidoscopes, we watch acrobats

and clowns, conjurors and knife throwers turn back

the epochs as if pages in a book.

 

Like a sudden rush of snare drums, a brief

and heavy shower accompanies

the finale – but we emerge from the big top

into that special freshness after rain.

The church bell is tolling for evensong.

As if there were no sin, house martins

swerve and bank and twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE LAST TASMANIAN TIGER….

David Selzer By David Selzer10 Comments1 min read2.8K views

…though striped in part was not, in fact, a tiger,

or feline in any way, but related

to the kangaroo, so a marsupial,

with a head and muzzle a bit like a bear’s,

and the dimensions of an Alsatian dog.

Somebody named him Benjamin – a joke

probably: the last of Jacob’s sons,

and Israel’s progenitor. Some footage

survives, in black and white, of the animal

in his small, bleak cage in Hobart Zoo.

The newsreel’s pompous and slightly smarmy

voice-over, accompanied by tea-dance jazz,

tells us the beast was ‘forced out of his

natural habitat by the march

of civilisation’. Presumably

whoever wrote the script had more in mind than

the penal colony, or the genocide

of the Palawi peoples, whose land

of temperate heathlands and forests,

wind-weathered mountains, rich estuaries

this had been for more than thirty thousand years.

 

The Palawi, watching those wan copies

of proper human beings, who arrived

unbidden, with their extravagant

paraphernalia, in big boats

borne by pale, shifting cloths like clouds,

may have wondered what barren place those angry

impostors came from, showing no respect

for what flies or swims or walks, or even

for the water or the air,  for anything,

especially each other.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE GREAT UNCONFORMITY

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read3.4K views

A couple of weeks into the Great Lockdown –

robins nesting in the ivy, wild bees

in the eaves, as usual – we were

visited one day by a carrion crow,

its feathers of a blackness beyond

perfection, clinkered armour buffed bright.

It landed, the size of a large cat,

on our modest bird bath beside the lilies

beginning to burgeon. In its beak

was a portion-sized piece of baguette

or ciabatta, which it dropped in the water,

then flew off. At intervals it returned,

snacked on the softening bread, and left.

 

For a week and more it had the same routine

each day – and then never appeared again.

Maybe its local supply of hard, stale crusts

closed down – or it discovered a bakery

careless with fresh products. Its curious

visits, though fascinating, held a threat.

What if it’s ‘caw, caw’ were merely cover,

and, when it rejoined its muster, it said,

‘Comrades, here’s an end to waiting for the crumbs!’

or, alternatively, ‘Colleagues, regarding

the dry bread problem, I have a proposal…’?

I imagined an Hitchcockian horde

darkening our skies, murdering paradise.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

WHAT THE HEART REMEMBERS

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.2K views

A young girl is reading in a white armchair.

On the crimson tablecloth is a pink rose

in a glass of water. (She has kept the bloom

from when she was weaving flowers – its petals

superfluous to her design). The book

she is reading she first read three years ago,

when she was seven: its themes – of childhood,

and alchemy, and unambiguous frontiers

only beyond which evil thrives – enclose like

the high arms of her chair, though she is tall,

and is lithe like a fawn. In another room,

socially distant on a coral sofa

with deep cushions, an old woman, lovely

as she has always been, is reading a book

she has never read: about murders,

in a city – of revolution

and compliance, of concrete highways

and ancient lanes – she will never travel to;

of love difficult, transcendent. An old man,

shorter than he was, and a mite ursine,

socially distant on a chaise longue

in an adjacent room, is also reading

a book he has never read: a walled garden

of distant voices; unrequited love;

age and youth immured in anxiety; fire

the inexorable destination,

and the anonymity of ash.

 

Tomorrow, because to be human,

almost whatever the odds, is to try

to be hopeful, the girl will climb the stairs,

and the couple, at her call, will leave their books,

and become spectators. At the fourth stair

she will stop, turn, and, using the banister

for leverage, jump up into the air –

the ancient balustrade and balusters,

indifferent to the fall of empires,

will quiver like saplings.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: WINDOWS OF DISCOURSE

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

‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate’. THE COMMON GOOD, Noam Chomsky

 

A dormouse, leaping into a boiling cauldron,

leaps out, protesting. Some others, resting,

with breathing apparatus, trustingly

at the bottom of a pot of water

arctic-cold, will never ever notice

the incrementally increasing heat…

 

For nearly twenty five years the BBC

broadcast, on week days, a pre-school programme

called ‘Play School’ – its title no doubt to warn

its viewers there would be no play at Big School.

One of its features was three windows – arched,

round and square – through which short films would show…

 

Imagine the dystopian edition

broadcast to celebrate the abolition

of the civil service, and the launch

of compulsory, daily visits

to Wetherspoons in order to consume

buckets of chlorinated chicken wings…

 

‘Look, boys and girls, in the arched window

is Permanent Prime Minister Johnson

and Grand Adviser Cummings enjoying a joke!;

in the round window is the Permanent

Opposition being elected

every five years; in the square window…’

 

…are whatever scenes from a civic hell

you may fear to conjure – where clowns rule,

and the wise are laughed at, where prejudice

is extolled, learning punished, gradual

hierarchies of wealth and worth approved,

and official violence is esteemed…

 

You may choose whatever shape of window

you wish – from the range available, of course,

a range in which each one constrains your view

to the absolute limits of whatever

protocols of debate are acceptable

to stenographers and broadcasters

of those who control public discourse.

So, your choice: be a colony of dumb

dormice in a tepid pan – or be the one

that leaps, speaks…

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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