POETRY

POETRY

ALWAYS WITH YOU

By David SelzerJanuary 30, 20201 Comment2 min read1.7K 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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POETRY

2019

By David SelzerDecember 27, 20194 Comments2 min read3.2K 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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POETRY

MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE

By David SelzerDecember 27, 20192 Comments1 min read2K views

Before the marsh on the coastal plain was drained –

to turn the dark, rich glacial soil

into the broad fields of market gardens,

selling fresh produce south to the port city

burgeoning daily from mouth to mouth –

the mere was vast, eight square miles and more.

Family groups wandered the margins –

to fish, collect eggs, snare birds. Settlements

became hamlets, became villages:

cutting the reeds for thatching, cutting the peat

for cooking fires from the ice age bogland.

***

The long orangey-pink streaks of sun setting

over the Irish Sea turn the lake

from silver to pewter, and the birds

to cut-outs. A two carriage commuter train

crosses at the furthest edge, its windows

rectangles of bright yellow in the twilight –

as the watchers in the hides observe,

in a barely whispered wonderment,

thousands of pink-footed geese appear.

They are wintering here from the breeding grounds

in the mountains of Iceland and Greenland –

by day feeding on stubble fields, in the dusk

settling noisily on these dark waters

with their poignant, slightly throaty calls,

their myriad wings black in the fading light.

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POETRY

LORD WOOLAVINGTON’S HOUSE PARTY, AUGUST 1922

By David SelzerDecember 27, 20190 Comments1 min read1.3K views

Jimmy Buchanan, self-made whisky tycoon,

became Lord Woolavington of Lavington,

Sussex, in January ’22.

He acquired his peerage, it was said,

with a post-dated cheque signed ‘Woolavington’.

To celebrate he hosted a lavish

grouse-shooting party that Glorious Twelfth

on his moorland estate near the Moray Firth.

To prepare for the party, heather had been scorched

so young grouse might fatten on the new shoots.

The corpses of polecats and pine martens

had been hung on gates and from fence posts,

and skies emptied of hen harriers,

and purged of the dancing of red kites.

There is a photograph of a guest posing –

in tweeds, sporran, kilt, a gillie beside him,

a retriever at his feet – with his shotgun

at the ready. He is standing in a butt

of cut, piled heather. He is waiting

for the hired beaters to drive the birds up

so they are silhouetted against the sky.

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POETRY

OUTLASTING KINGS

By David SelzerDecember 27, 20191 Comment1 min read1.9K views

At Chester Zoo, where conservation rules

and breeding programmes thrive, there are three

Asiatic lions – two females

and a male, without progeny as yet –

in the old African lion compound,

one of Zoo’s first fairly spacious

enclosures. There is sand, grass, mature trees –

reflecting the creature’s historical range

from the Euphrates to the Indus,

from the Levant to the Bay of Bengal.

They have been hunted almost to death,

and are teetering on extinction’s edge

confined to a forest in Gujarat.

This trio, who have known nothing but zoos

and probably consider themselves human,

basks where most of their visitors gather.

A clang of the feeding station’s gate and their names

bring them instantly to their pristine power –

the deep growl, the agility, the heft –

as they grab and gnaw their share of carcass.

The kings of Nineveh kept them for hunting,

in the desert wastes of Northern Iraq,

a royal sport to impress their subjects,

and had their power immortalised by chance

in impeccable bas-reliefs of such

stylised realism. Who would have thought

that lions might outlast kings!

Note: The poem was written in 2017. Chester Zoo, this year, has created a new enclosure for the lions – https://www.chesterzoo.org/whats-here/asiatic-lions-habitat/ – @chesterzoo. The bas-reliefs are currently on display at the British Museum – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Hunt_of_Ashurbanipal.

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POETRY