POETRY

POETRY

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read2.9K views

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – tale

of adultery and obsession –

was published in 1850. In the year

the Crimean War began, he became

the U.S. Consul in Liverpool,

a post gifted by his friend the President.

He did not like the job despite the fees

from the cargoes of cotton and molasses

hoisted ashore. Whether in a Hansom cab

home to his family in lodgings in the town,

on the steam ferry to the rented villa

in the gated park on the Wirral,

or on the train to the rented house

on Southport’s Esplanade he felt too close

to the piratical-looking tars,

who washed up on the consulate steps.

 

His friend, Herman Melville – whose Moby Dick (tale

of arrogance and obsession) was published

in 1851 – had once been

a young sailor lost in the town’s quayside stews.

When he and his family did the Grand Tour

they set off from Liverpool, staying a week

with the Hawthornes in Southport. One evening

the writers took their cigars among the dunes

and, facing west across the twilight waves

of Liverpool Bay, spoke of providence,

eternity. Courageous innovators

that they were, no doubt each secretly,

that night, thought the other might have penned

the supreme fiction of their elusive land.

But the dark fields of the Republic

were rolling towards them – Little Bighorn

and Wounded Knee, Shiloh and Gettysburg.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE SORES OF WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

‘…sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments…’ TWEET, President Trump

 

In a letter to the New York Times three years

before the war, General Robert E. Lee

described slavery per se as ‘a moral

and political evil’ and, in the States,

‘a greater evil to the white man’

than the black. In 1857 Lee

had been his father-in-law’s executor.

George Custis had manumitted his slaves

on his death bed there and then but ‘no white man

was in the room’. Lee promised them freedom

in five years. Three escaped but were caught.

The plantation’s overseer refused

to whip them. The local constable agreed.

They were stripped and lashed many times –  the men

fifty, their sister twenty. ‘Lay it on well!’

the General ordered. After the war

Lee refused an invitation to join

senior officers from the Blue and the Gray

at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg

to mark key moments with granite monuments.

‘I think it wiser,’ he replied, ‘not to keep

open the sores of war.’

 

 

Note: The poem was first published on the site in November 2017.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE COLSTON BUN

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2.5K views

‘And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.’ DEUTERONOMY 12.3

‘Black deaths do not have a good press, especially when they occur in the custody of our custodians. The media leads the public to believe that our guardians can do no wrong. Racism leads them to believe that blacks can do no right. The silence of the custodial system is compounded by the silences of racism.’ DEADLY SILENCE: BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY, Institute of Race Relations, London, 1991

 

Anger, one Sunday in June, overcame

decorum in that diverse city,

and – no doubt, inspired by the toppling

of other graven tyrants – righteously

pulled down the effigy, with a thump of stone

and a hollow gong of metal, and tossed it

from the quay into the harbour waters.

***

The Royal African Company received

its charter from Charles II and James,

his brother, hence the US east coast seaports

Jamestown and Charleston. It was established

by the restored royals to provide them,

free of interference from the Commons,

with their own spending money. Board members

included the philosopher, John Locke.

The company’s profits came mostly

from enslaving West African men, women

and children, and transporting them across

the North Atlantic’s turbulence. More than

two hundred thousand were taken, and nearly

fifty thousand died on the journey,

the firm’s double entry bookkeeping shows.

 

One prominent member of the board

was Edward Colston, a Bristol merchant,

the city from whose harbour the slavers sailed,

and which, in due course, would make chocolates

and cigarettes. His philanthropy

inveigled the streets like a bad conscience,

almost a rebuke of victimhood:

his name on a hospital, a school,

a bun flavoured with dried currants and allspice

topped with sugar, given to the poor yearly

and still made for sale by local bakeries –

and himself looking thoughtful in bronze

with a periwig and a walking stick.

 

Apologists who claim he was merely

of his time, an accidental racist,

and collateral ethical damage,

like Henry Wills and Elizabeth Fry,

should remember John Locke, his damascene

moment unrecorded, who threw his shares

into the fire. ‘Slavery is so vile and

miserable an estate of man …that ’tis

hardly to be conceived’. That June Sunday

civic anger overcame decorum.

 

 

Note: The above is a revised version of the piece originally published on 25.6.20. The revisions are the result of e discussions with a regular reader, Elise Oliver – please see Comments.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CONTAGION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K 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 read2K 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 read2.6K 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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