POETRY

POETRY

LAMENT FOR THE FOURTH ESTATE

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

Once Parliament was in recess – both Houses

of Hypocrisy on their long summer hols –

in the basement of an office block near

King’s Cross (where you catch the Hogwarts Express)

one Saturday morning in July,

three journalists, watched by two technicians

from GCHQ, spent three hours to save

the Government’s face, and The Guardian’s,

by destroying hard drives with drills and grinders,

circuit boards whose data – from the exiled

whistleblower Edward Snowden – was

replicated throughout the Americas.

Ah, far, far  better farce than inaction,

and capitulation than loss of

influence! How the Red Tops rejoiced!

 

Only the Manchester Guardian – founded

after Peterloo, and to promote

repeal of the so-called Corn Laws – condemned

the Suez Canal fiasco, that last

hurrah of gunboat diplomacy.

That editor would have hidden the hard drives

somewhere in the British Library’s stacks,

just round the corner on the Euston Road,

and sent the hapless lads from Cheltenham

to Platform  9¾.

 

 

 

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POETRY

GLOBALISATION

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

The summer LA hosted the Olympics –

the year the UK miner’s strike began,

and comrades became enemies, and things sure

fell irredeemably apart – we went

on a four day tour of mostly ancient Greece:

Corinth Canal; the amphitheatre

at Epidaurus; Nafplio’s converted

mosque; the Lion Gate at Mycenae;

Olympia’s temples; Delphi’s omphalos.

 

Swallows had made their mud nests in the eaves

of the three concrete hotels we stayed at,

the birds’ tender flights twittering omens

for travellers who were, in some ways,

an air-conditioned charabanc of fools:

a sour couple, escapees from the Games;

a young bull fighter from Mexico

with his aging parents; three frat boys

from Berkeley; a well dressed Swiss family

of four;  a Nam Vet paranoid about

the Cosa Nostra; a demanding

Italian family of five; a nice

young  couple from Denver keen on Benny Hill;

and us three quiet Brits the Americans thought

were French and the Europeans Yanks.

 

As we ascended towards Delphi,

with Mount Parnassus beyond, we drove

along Kolpos Iteas, Bayonet Bay.

Below, anchored in its deep, sheltered waters,

were a dozen oil tankers – gifts which some Greeks

would come bearing again in due course but,

meanwhile, lay becalmed in OPEC’s doldrums.

 

 

 

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POETRY

PASTORALE

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

From the west front of this Restoration house –

built a century before the demand

for coal brought, in hearing of the brocaded

drawing room, the daily clank and hiss

of the pit head winding gear and the pumps

keeping the seams dry, and, in direct

line of sight of the spacious steps, the slagheap’s

incremental growth on land previously

considered worthless so not purchased –

was a view, across the shallow valley

and extensive pasture land, of benign hills.

 

The slagheap was treed post-Aberfan,

the pit closed under Thatcher, and the headgear

retained, like the stately home, a monument

to that other country. Under cropped fields

where lambs suckle this February day,

abandoned, expensive machinery

rusts in fallen, inundated seams.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE FALLACY OF WARNINGS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

For Ashen Venema

 

Walking back to the house from the composter

one late afternoon in early autumn

I looked up, and stopped. There was a roseate,

mackerel sky moving from North East Wales

over the Cheshire Plain towards the Pennines,

and drifting above me. Whatever weather

it presaged, it was ordinarily

lovely, a mundane epiphany.

 

At the kitchen door I turned and there

was a raven on the paving where I had been,

that frequenter of uplands, and slaughter.

I thought of Lawrence and the snake and waited.

The bird was in profile twenty feet away –

immense, and sleek, and dark as anthracite.

 

I saw, beyond the bird, our neighbour’s’ cat

approaching in stalking mode. The raven,

opening its wings unhurriedly,

rose into the sky with its mocking

call like a witch’s laugh.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE BLACK CARAVAN

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

The front page of Brexit Day’s Forgers’ Gazette

was a photo of the White Cliffs of Dover

with ‘A NEW DAWN FOR BRITAIN’ superimposed

on the blue sky above  – and the sun, by chance,

highlighting the erosion of the chalk,

ephemeral and flaky as metaphor.

 

***

 

After the war, when things were in short supply,

and we had drawing, occasionally,

I drew a layered landscape with wax crayons:

blue sky with bird and cloud, bright green grass,

and high, white cliffs, and a black caravan,

where the stony beach and the chalk bluff met.

I imagined myself inside. My father

was lost in the war, my mother bereft.

I stroked the sugar paper into dreams.

 

***

 

Today, out of a bright sky, a northerly

is rushing, thundering through this copse

of larch and spruce. Among the trees camellias,

with their lustrous leaves, are beginning to bloom,

the colours rich amid the conifers.

The wind, through this stand of evergreens,

is almost louder than the roar of aircraft

overhead, coming into land nearby

with cargoes from France, stockpiling as for war.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

NEW YEAR, BUDAPEST

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read3.1K views

On one of the corners of St Stephen’s square

is a café, the California

Coffee Company, with cheery slogans,

in English, extolling the benefits

of the bean. A window seat gives a view,

across the square, of the west entrance

to the basilica of Szent Istvan,

its portico embossed in gold with

‘Ego Sum Veritas et Vita’.

 

Our backs to the basilica we walk

down Zyrini Street towards the Danube,

Buda rising high on its western slopes.

As we pass the Cognitive Department

of the Soros-funded University

of Central Europe – which the government

has shut down – three students emerge carrying

a mattress in plastic wrapping, one wearing

a sweatshirt marked ‘#istandwithceu’.

 

On the embankment near the Chain Bridge –

designed and built by British engineers

after the ’48 revolution –

are empty sparkler packets, New Year’s discards.

The gun metal water is fast, turbulent.

Upstream is a row of cast iron boots and shoes.

There, while the Red Army shelled the city,

the Christmas and New Year of ’44/

’45, the Arrow Cross (whose informal

motto was ‘Perseverance’) shot thousands – Jews,

communists, Roma – forcing them to remove

their footwear first, and stand on the embankment’s edge

their backs to the river.

 

 

 

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