POETRY

POETRY

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read2.7K views

Impelled by Wall Street and the Pentagon,

and the vanity of Presidents,

the astronauts had seemed to sail beyond

experience – but we TV millions watched

live ‘Old Glory’ stiffen above us;

heard Nixon speak; saw Aldrin at attention.

Meanwhile, oblivious, the Vietcong

were waiting patiently in their tunnels.

 

***

 

The day of the moon landing we walked up

Bidston Hill to the Observatory,

where my great grandfather – who had captained

coffin ships to Boston – in his old age

studied the tides. Our little girl played on slabs

of ice-smoothed sandstone, and recited

‘The moon has a face like the clock in the hall’.

Birkenhead below lay sharply in sunlight –

maritime, sooty, long in decline.

 

***

 

Above the scrofulous cities of the earth

the contraptions spin like discarded coins.

We are trashing the universe, and time

is no shorter than it ever was for us

of the broken countries, which corrupt,

like mouths of rotten teeth, all they encroach.

 

 

Note: ‘SAME OLD, SAME OLD’ is a re-working of ‘NEW HEROES’ written in August and September 1969 – first published in Phoenix (Winter 1972) and re-published in Elsewhere (1973).

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

DAY BREAKING

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

Sleepless I opened the slats of the bathroom’s

white Venetian blind expecting darkness

but the eastern sky over our neighbours’ roofs

was already pale, and the Morning Star glowed

gilded, and I suddenly remembered

being in the yard of an old coaching inn,

standing by a sandstone horse trough still used

for hunts, its water frozen so deeply

I could only crack the surface with my fist.

Behind the inn farmland – ploughed, hoar frosted,

horse trampled – stretched unfenced over a rise.

 

Disconnected shames and regrets, that restless,

anxious night, had jerked through my synapses

like shunted railway wagons. Seeing the star,

watching the day becoming lucent,

I wondered how the memory of

something so seemingly innocent,

and so soon over, should have lasted

and returned unprompted like some sort of

revelation: remembering the ice

in the trough, and, stretching out of sight,

those ridden, roughshod fields.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ORGANISED CRIMES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K 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

WALKING HOME

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

We talked of those we had worked with that day,

and those with whom we would work again.

We passed, as always, so many walking,

as we left Chiawelo in Soweto.

We were returning to New Redruth,

where the Cornish tin miners were exiled

to grow the gold reefs and shine the diamonds.

We joined the steady rush hour traffic

on the N12 South. Passing the Gleneagles

shopping mall, I saw, on the hard shoulder

of the opposite carriageway, a man,

barefoot, bearded, young,  literally in rags –

his shirt and cut-offs multi-coloured strips –

striding north calmly, purposefully.

 

Maybe my companions saw him too.

If so we never spoke of it, perhaps

not having the words or the heart to talk

of that man, travelling as if he had walked

on the same road from its beginnings

in the Western Cape and would walk to its

ending in Mpumalanga, like one

walking home after work.

 

 

 

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POETRY

WATCHING THE STORM

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

From Llandwyn Beach we watch – safely, distantly –

rain clouds, across the bay and the beginnings

of the Irish Sea, obscure the coast

and then the three mountain peaks, one by one,

of the Ll?n Peninsula. We hear thunder

trundle on the high ground and rumble

in the valleys, and see lightning fork,

furnace yellow, in the ash grey clouds.

 

Watching a storm at such a calm remove

is like two scholars in faux panama hats

watching the past, observing history.

The tide is much further out than ever;

low rocks exposed we have never seen, brown

with rack, adorned with limpets, mussels, clams;

Caernafon Bar ghostly beneath the waves.

We have been side by side on Traeth Llandwyn

at least once almost every year

since August ’62 – the month Mandela

was arrested, and Marilyn Monroe died.

 

We had walked from Newborough village

through the plantation of pine saplings

to bind the dunes, keep sand from barricading

doors, occupying the cemetery.

We were alone that first summer’s day,

the wide, embracing strand entirely ours.

 

The wind shifts suddenly with the tide.

We pack away our novels – Colm Toíbín,

Anne Tyler – and fold up our chairs. We pass

a large jubilant family gathering

setting up a windbreak and a barbecue.

As we drive along the metalled road,

through what has become a forest, the rain falls –

wipers flick it away.

 

 

 

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POETRY

DOWN THE LINE

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

For Kira Somach

 

I have regular readers – some I have known

for years, others I will never meet –

on every continent except

Antarctica: a wonder not a boast!

One, an actual friend from long ago,

tells me, via email, that she often reads

some of my poems over the phone

to her father – she in Missouri,

he in Florida: to remind them

of his years working in England,

and her years here becoming a woman.

Sometimes she rehearses the reading

before she makes the call. I like to imagine

the words spoken down a telephone wire:

under the Mississipi, over

the Appalachians, around the Everglades –

but I guess the sounds are bounced from the sky,

across longitudes and latitudes

and a multiplicity of time zones,

which is no less extraordinary,

no less amazing, no less humbling – my words

sounding through the ether.

 

 

 

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