POETRY

POETRY

A RIGHT CHARIVARI!

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

BANK HOLIDAY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.9K 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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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

BILLY GOATS GRUFF

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

After dark, down the steep lanes of the Great Orme –

a two mile long limestone promontory,

named by Norsemen for a dragon’s head –

past the synagogue and the funicular,

avoiding the temptations of the Pier,

into the lamp-lit, locked-down thoroughfare,

came the Kashmiri billy goats, white as snow,

as clouds, as sea spume. Runaways or outcasts

from a flock imported for their wool,

occasional mascots for the Royal Welsh,

those noisome foragers with their prophets’ beards

and trophy horns capered to the churchyard

and its privet hedges, while the nannies

and the kids slept on ledges above the sea.

 

All were indifferent to what was written

in the pages of Ecclesiastes,

left open by chance in the church where no one

worshipped now, on the eagle-shaped lectern

made of brass: ‘But if a man live many years,

and rejoice in them all; yet let him

remember the days of darkness; for they shall

be many. All that cometh is vanity.’

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

APOCALYPSE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

Via Del Corso, Rome, March 2020.

The boutiques had been closed by decree, even

Calvin Klein Underwear and Brooks Brothers.

The only pedestrians were the Pope,

in his white robes, and his bodyguard,

in bulging suits – on a pilgrimage

to the ancient church of San Marcello

set back from the street. Beneath a crucifix,

used to assuage a 15th century plague,

Pope Francis prayed to God to stop the virus.

 

The street, in Roman times, was Via Lata –

Broad Way – and ran through the Field of Mars

towards the Adriatic. At Mardi Gras,

in the Renaissance, the Ghetto was emptied

and the Jews paraded along the street

so that the Christians could mock and scorn.

 

Italy’s churches had been closed by decree –

except in the north where some were being used

as temporary morgues, from which corpses

were taken, for cremation, day and night,

by slow convoys of army lorries.

 

Like riderless horses around a race track,

history repeats and repeats, and God,

who was thought to be dead, may merely be deaf.

 

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POETRY

DANCING ON AIR

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.2K views

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.

Meditations In Time Of Civil War, W.B. Yeats

 

There are barricades at both ends of the street.

They have been building for a couple of days –

a skip, a burned-out pick-up, rotten timber.

Someone appears at our door at dusk or dawn,

claiming to be from one side or the other,

begging, asking, demanding contributions –

that folding chair, this old garden bench,

alcohol, books. So far only our region/district

is in turmoil, or in righteousness –

the utilities uninterrupted.

Drones are overhead. We may see ourselves,

and our predicament on the internet.

Our neighbours have gone, deserting their houses.

 

Possibly in time each faction will attempt

to commandeer our house, a salient –

the lead valley in the roof overlooks

one barricade, a side window the other.

Each night, once the little one is sleeping,

we review our long term options: surrender,

or starve. Short term we are optimists.

We read, draw, tell stories, play the piano.

 

A colony of wild bees these last few weeks

has occupied the nesting place in the eaves

starlings abandoned perhaps a decade ago.

With the little one we have studied them,

each day, dancing on air.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

Under an April moon the tussocky field

abounds in rabbits. Its hedgerows are sprinkled

with blackthorn blossom creamy in moonlight.

Dark green poplars border the canal

beside the field. Daylight exposes,

behind a hedge, discarded technology:

a wheel-less tractor propped up on breeze blocks.

A troika of Russians on a narrow boat

sings plangently of the motherland.

 

Sudden rain sweeps across the poplars.

It turns to hail on the rusted tractor;

silences the song; shreds white petals;

rolls down a rabbit hole.

 

 

 

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