POETRY

POETRY

WHAT IS IT THAT STARTS A POEM?

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

Although it is a cold evening,

down by one of the fishhouses

an old man sits netting…  

AT THE FISHHOUSES Elizabeth Bishop

 

What is it that starts a poem? What rupture –

a fish tugging at a hook? What rapture –

the seventh wave breaking as it should?

Consider Elizabeth Bishop:

fatherless at one; her mother certified

four years later; taken from her grandparents

in Nova Scotia by her father’s parents

in Massachusetts; a Vassar girl

with a private income; a painter

as well as a poet. What was it that cold

evening on the fish quay in Nova Scotia

that started her poem? A favourite seal

bobbing off shore, to which she sang Baptist hymns?

The Atlantic? The herring scales and the cod

that adorned every plank? The Lucky Strikes

she smoked with the old man mending his nets

‘in the gloaming almost invisible’,

her grandfather’s friend?

 

 

 

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POETRY

PAINTING PARADISE

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read1.8K views

If I were a painter – and I would have

so many memorable titles – I would paint

your garden in all its rooms and seasons:

across the high back wall spring’s coral pink

clematis; summer’s sword-leaved, red-flamed

crocosmia by the aquamarine

gazebo; the white, weathered table and chairs

and the acer on the dark-brick terrace;

plants inherited, self-seeded, handed on

in stewardship – a world compendium.

You are the architect, builder, labourer –

and only begetter: ‘Sylvia Among

Her Sonnets Without Words’.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ORGANISED CRIMES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.8K views

I watched the TV parade of affluent

(and mostly public school) chancers, liars,

fantasists, hypocrites, law-breakers

vie to top each other’s warmed-up clichés

and self-serving platitudes. The social

and economic future dystopia most

seemed to desire would, they assured us,

bring out the British best in all of us,

just like the Blitz. I thought of bomb-razed

building lots in major cities still empty,

and a tale a cabby told me years ago,

taxiing me from the railway station.

 

As he dropped me off he looked at the house.

He asked if it had a cellar, with a door

opening onto the back garden. I nodded.

He and his mum, he said, had joined a silent

and lengthy queue to buy black market sugar.

‘A doctor lived here then, ran a racket

with the lad that worked at the grocer’s.

The lad did time. The medic got off scot-free.’

 

I did some research, worked out the dates.

Here, in this place of light we have made our home,

all those ordinary folk committed crimes

like common recidivists – while London

was bombed, and Coventry, and Liverpool,

and the BBC broadcast Churchill’s speeches

of carefully crafted rhetoric.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ALL THIS IS BUT A DREAM

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

For Barbara and John Huddart

 

On this calm summer evening the North Sea falls

unheard on the wide sands below the castle

in whose inner ward the play is set – and we

(an eclectic collection of friends)

have brought folding chairs, prosecco, pop,

and fish suppers from Seahouses nearby

along this coast of raiders and saints.

 ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite,’

says Juliet, a canny lass – though all

four players are canny lasses in this

very British, outdoor, touring ‘tale of woe’.

 

In the interval the sun sets like fire,

a titian furnace stretched across The Borders,

out-performing any artifice –

and when, in the last act, beyond the charmed

arena of spots and floods, night falls

and the air chills, bats, out of ancient crevices,

flitter between the words and over the shore.

 

 

Note: See The Handlebards.

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POETRY

ACROSS THE ESTUARY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

The beds of varicoloured reeds, fields almost,

stretch north and south along this bank for miles,

and westwards, nearly to Wales, across the wide,

silted river. Unseen marsh creatures scarcely

disturb the grasses. Egrets and herons

fly in and out of hidden lagoons.

Before silt, from here, the Dublin packet sailed –

with G.F. Handel and Jonathan Swift.

On the opposite shore are the ruins

of Flint Castle where Richard was dethroned –

‘…night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.’

Sun catches a window on Halkyn Mountain.

 

This year marks the first centenary

of the Amritsar massacre, the second

of Peterloo – but even now there are

doubters, equivocators, who minimise

the carnage, exculpate the perpetrators.

 

In the small car park behind us a car door

opens briefly – the radio announces,

in a public school accent, that there will be

never ending dystopia ‘until’

and ‘unless’. Today is the first of summer,

hot, windless, with dragonflies and bees

abounding. This remorseless marshland is

unequivocal – earth and vegetation

are ruthless, immaculate remembrancers.

 

 

 

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POETRY

OUT OF THE EARTH

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

The park’s diagonal avenue of limes

is in leaf. A warm southwesterly

billows through the foliage like falling surf,

like the tumultuous rushing of flames.

I watch you walk away under the trees,

and disappear into the green shade.

 

On the path directly opposite,

across an uncluttered expanse of grass,

you reappear some moments later,

undeterred by a surge of carefree cyclists

taking short cuts, or self-absorbed dog walkers.

You vanish beyond the wind-swept tennis courts.

 

As if I were some ancient and complacent

Orpheus I know that I shall see you –

walking beneath the tumult of the leaves,

sure-footed on the airy ground – and feel

that wave of love like fire.

 

 

 

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