POETRY

POETRY

NEW YEAR, BUDAPEST

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read2.6K views

On one of the corners of St Stephen’s square

is a café, the California

Coffee Company, with cheery slogans,

in English, extolling the benefits

of the bean. A window seat gives a view,

across the square, of the west entrance

to the basilica of Szent Istvan,

its portico embossed in gold with

‘Ego Sum Veritas et Vita’.

 

Our backs to the basilica we walk

down Zyrini Street towards the Danube,

Buda rising high on its western slopes.

As we pass the Cognitive Department

of the Soros-funded University

of Central Europe – which the government

has shut down – three students emerge carrying

a mattress in plastic wrapping, one wearing

a sweatshirt marked ‘#istandwithceu’.

 

On the embankment near the Chain Bridge –

designed and built by British engineers

after the ’48 revolution –

are empty sparkler packets, New Year’s discards.

The gun metal water is fast, turbulent.

Upstream is a row of cast iron boots and shoes.

There, while the Red Army shelled the city,

the Christmas and New Year of ’44/

’45, the Arrow Cross (whose informal

motto was ‘Perseverance’) shot thousands – Jews,

communists, Roma – forcing them to remove

their footwear first, and stand on the embankment’s edge

their backs to the river.

 

 

 

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POETRY

INTERSECTIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read1.9K views

There is a young woman with a wooden hoop

almost as big as herself – and a small dog

not much bigger than her head – who performs

circus tricks, where Terez Boulevard meets

Andrassy Avenue – named for an Empress

and a Count before old Europe fell apart.

As the three lanes idle at red and the dog

waits on the kerb the girl and the hoop

become an astrolabe, a gyroscope

within the interstices of traffic lights.

When she stills and bows to the varied windscreens

the dog leaps to her shoulder and together –

dancer, dog and hoop – they approach their rewards,

ignoring the anonymous tourists

crossing behind her, as if the corrida

with steel and engines were all. Yesterday,

though a slicing wind from the Danube

kept most windows shut, she gyrated

regardless. Today in snowflakes like

falling stars she spins still.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE VIEW FROM THE BASTION

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

With her new camera, a  Christmas present,

and with the intuitive surety,

at not quite nine, of how to make a picture,

she makes a sunlit panorama of Pest

from the Fisherman’s Bastion in Buda –

a Magyar edifice of walls and towers

built in the nineteen hundreds to celebrate

the permanence of the Habsburg Empire.

In a wall’s shadow she shows me the screen,

and what she has angled by chance. I note

the parliament building, the Great Synagogue,

the space where Imry Nagy’s statue was.

 

Beside a bronze equestrian statue

of Stephen the First, between the Bastion

and St Matthias Church, a white tailed eagle

and its handler (dressed for Ruritania)

wait for selfies with passing tourists.

She catches one such from the rear – a man

diminished by the bird perched on his shoulder.

 

 

 

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POETRY

BÖLCS VAR: THE HOUSE OF WISDOM

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

Formerly Buda’s town hall, courthouse, prison

and school, newly refurbished throughout

and re-named The House of Wisdom, it is now

bookshop, café, bistro, conference centre

and an esoteric museum –

in an eclectic city of museums

ranging from Marzipan through to Murder.

The refurbishment finally repaired

all the damage done by stray Red Army

artillery shells, and uncovered stonework –

exhibited behind glass now – not seen

since the Ottoman Empire ruled Hungary.

 

Eschewing the conundrum of hailing a cab –

by law all Budapest taxis are yellow

but not all yellow taxis are legal –

we waited for the bus on Castle Hill

to take us to our Pest apartment hotel,

near where the Nazis walled the Ghetto.

I thought how, unlike the rest of Europe,

the British have no living memories –

vestiges of checkpoints or watchtowers,

grandparents’ anecdotes, camps – of invasion,

occupation, totalitarian rule.

 

That night I dreamt I was five, and in Pest

not in the flat near Golders Green.

There were muffled shouts from the courtyard.

‘They are coming for the Jews.’ When I woke

I saw snow had fallen. On the balcony

a blackbird was hopping, its feet marks

criss-crossed like trellis. The bird looked at the glass,

its yellow beak shining.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ALWAYS WITH YOU

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.6K views

On a snowy January Saturday

we were delayed for six hours or so

at Ferenc Liszt airport, Budapest.

Except for the purchase of a Pick sausage

and a small box of Gerbeaud chocolates

in Heinemann Travel Value/Duty Free

we spent our time in the Leroy Bistro

with its international fast food cuisine

from nigiri sushi to Wiener Schnitzel.

 

From my seat in the bistro I could see

continually an advert, a fifteen

by forty feet video with, on the left,

Budapest’s Chain Bridge superimposed

on its Parliament with the Danube bluely

flowing beneath and blue bird sky above

stretching to the right, from east to west,

as the river’s embankment became

China’s Great Wall, and the slogan read

in red ‘Bank of China Always With You’.

 

We watched, as day darkened into night,

flakes change from grey to white then stop,

and perimeter lights become sharp.

Snow ploughs cleared the runway, planes took off

to Amsterdam, Istanbul, Tel-Aviv –

from this terminal of ironies, with its

foreign investors and its destinations,

in this nation obsessed still with ‘racial

hygiene’ and yet in which so very much

of Eurasia has miscegenated.

 

We were the penultimate flight to leave.

While we taxied to the runway we saw

the last flight – for Moscow – being boarded.

As we flew west I thought of the other craft’s

rapid journey over distances

the Magyar tribes took many years to cross –

and that, beyond the broadest tract of land

untempered by the sea, the sun was rising

on the Bank of China.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

2019

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2.7K views

‘O what fine thought we had because we thought

That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.’

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN, W.B. Yeats

 

Where the four main thoroughfares of our erstwhile

Roman city meet, a many-legged dragon,

in vivid gold and red, curved and reared, to gongs,

drums, fire crackers on a February day.

Dancers whirled long white ribbons, a whorl

of streamers like a wild, wispy sky.

This was the year of the omnivorous Pig,

saturninely devouring its own children.

Next is the Rat, ubiquitous, cunning –

happy for self-harming fools, tax-dodging knaves.

 

 

***

 

Some of the elected representatives

of the people turned their tailored backs

on ‘The Ode to Joy’ – Alle Menschen

werden Brüder – that song of protest,

that anthem of jubilant community.

Two hundred years ago was Peterloo,

one hundred Amritsar. Injustice

is never forgotten – and good sense

may prevail. The parochial rhetoric

of violent, bitter men may choke them,

in their locked courts and gated houses!

The wisdom of the crowd, not its ineptness,

its ignorance, its folly may save us:

reform our lottery democracy,

unite Ireland, free Scotland, make Wales

autonomous, England a federation!

 

***

 

The new decade is close. You can hear

its jostling caravanserai of guile

and deceit; its proxy civil wars; its

alchemy of assertions made truths,

lies transmogrified into speculations,

hatreds tempered into virtues, histories

traduced, honesty persecuted.

But listen!  There, far off, is a mustering

of rustling drums, the subtle summonings

of gongs. Let chaos be our only hope,

and the triumph of youth!

 

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