POETRY

POETRY

CONTAGION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K 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 read1.9K 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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POETRY

GUESTS OF LIFE

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.5K 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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POETRY

THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.2K 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 read1.9K 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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