POETRY

POETRY

THE LION OF KNIDOS

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.2K views

Near one corner of the British Museum’s

Great Court – the largest, roofed, public square

in Europe – the Lion reclines on a plinth.

It was stolen, a couple of years

after the Crimean War, from a ruined

tomb in Turkey. Its limestone body

had once been adorned with marble, its empty

eye sockets with glass to glint in sunlight

and glow in moonlight. Whether because

its pockmarked flanks seem sad or its eyeless face

appears benign visitors are keen to pose

for photos with the beast as backdrop.

 

I sit and watch. Three Buddhist monks, holding

their museum bags, snap each other.

Meanwhile, running deftly through the visitors,

my granddaughter returns delighted

from the many spoils of Ancient Egypt.

 

As natural light morphs into electric

the youngest monk comes back to take a selfie.

He turns and twists to angle his iPhone –

and immortalise the great blind head that now

looks both wise and simple.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

CONVALESCENCE

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

We drove towards the River Dee – down walled lanes

with rhododendrons festooning the sandstone,

their attic blooms in imperial colours –

to visit a doughty friend convalescing,

from two knee replacements, in Seize The Day,

a recently opened upmarket care home.

 

As we turned into the drive, I realised

that this, long before rebuilding, was where

my mother had first trained to be a nurse –

sixteen, with her friend, Belle. They cared for children

with TB from the Liverpool slums.

This unpolluted estuary’s airs

and the views of distant Welsh hilltops

through the coast’s pine woodlands might soothe and cure.

 

Our friend was listening to La Traviata.

I recalled a photo of the two girls smiling,

in uniform, on a veranda

with two of their charges on iron bedsteads.

The children stare at the camera

as if it were their only photograph.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ASYLUM SEEKER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

i.m. Samuel Selzer

 

He was never sure if it had been a joke

when the police arrested him for being,

he learned later, Jack the Ripper,

even though the last murder had been

a dozen years before, and he himself

had been eight and far away – or just

a lesson for yet another alien

wandering Whitechapel as if he had

a right to be lost in a pea souper.

 

Fresh from the Hamburg boat docked at Tilbury,

with no understanding of English

or the Roman alphabet, astray

from his equally ignorant, naive

travelling companions – oldest sons

escaping the twenty year conscription

into the Tzar’s army, all believing

they had arrived at last in Manhattan –

he was ‘sprung’ from his cell in the early hours

by the Jewish Board of Guardians.

 

A wry, resilient man, weathering

bankruptcy, his son’s death, his wife’s,

he always told the tale with humour –

another greener mislaid in the fog.

‘In Kiev if a policeman walks towards you,’

he told me, ‘you step in the gutter!

Better a night in the Leman Street lock-up

at eighteen than a lifetime of fear!’

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE BRIDGE

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

Where the Menai Straits are at their narrowest,

between two bluffs, Thomas Telford chose to build

his one span suspension bridge, high enough

for tall ships to pass. The two towers,

exposed to the tides, were built of limestone blocks

from the Penmon quarries on the coast

north of here. Caernavon Castle had been built

from Penmon stone – and blocks were shipped to Dublin

to line the Liffey with wharfs and quays.

 

Telford, the ‘Colossus of Roads’, was reared

in penury – a stone mason by trade,

a self-taught engineer, begetter of

the A5 coaching road, erstwhile Watling Street;

the London-Holyhead trunk from Marble Arch

to Admiralty Arch by the Irish Sea.

 

Built a generation later, a mile south

and within sight, is Stephenson’s railway bridge.

Two British industrial colossi

so close in space and time! So much investment,

ingenuity, innovation, to keep

the Catholic colonies of Ireland,

those reserves of navvies and wheat, in thrall!

 

Between the bridges are The Swellies

around Fish Trap Island – Ynys Gorad Goch –

whirling at high tide, lake calm at low water.

The Druids, deemed Rome’s enemies, were hunted.

They crossed here in coracles, felt safe at last

on Ynys Môn, Mam Cymru.  They watched the soldiers

swim like dogs across the sacred waters.

Rome’s mercenaries ran them down like boar,

skewering them among the flowering gorse.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

AN AFTERNOON IN MAY

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

By our side gate the old laburnum – whose wood,

in time, may make a chanter or a flute –

is in bloom. I look up through its branches.

There is a little azure and smidgens

of green – and droplets, ringlets, links, chains

of cascading yellow, a torrent of gold.

 

***

 

Our Victorian neighbourhood fills

with the machined roar of twin turbofans.

An Airbus Beluga – more Arctic whale

than Caspian sturgeon – with cargoes

of worked metal from Toulouse, banks low

over the churchyard’s antique horse chestnuts.

 

***

 

A heron, crossing from one river

to another, beats above our chimney pots,

and three swifts, harbingers, curve through the blue.

A blackbird, perched on the laburnum’s

aureate halcyon canopy,

imbues the street with song.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE MUSEUMS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.9K views

For Sizwe Vilakazi

 

ROBBEN ISLAND, CAPE TOWN

 

Except when the Atlantic fog surprises,

from high ground in the city the island

is present like a leviathan,

its lights at night like white phosphorous,

a place of banishment since the first ships,

among seals and penguins.

 

DISTRICT SIX, CAPE TOWN

 

Razing its streets, clearing this cosmopolis

of Asians, atheists, Blacks, booksellers,

Buddhists, Christians, Coloureds, cooks, Hindus, Jews,

musicians, Muslims, seafarers, Whites,

this is what it was all about – the racial

myths, the scorn, the humiliation,

the torture, the killings – to justify

the theft of property.

 

APARTHEID, FREEDOM PARK, JOHANNESBURG

 

Beneath the Pillars of the Constitution,

in the gardens the weaver birds are knitting

their elaborate nests from grass and reeds

precariously over water.

 

Inside is the Mercedes workers hand built

for Mandela, and a BAE designed

troop-carrying Casspir, mine and bullet proof,

to patrol the townships.

 

HECTOR PIETERSON, ORLANDO WEST, SOWETO

 

When the school children took to the dirt streets

in their uniforms and walked as one

towards the dogs and the guns and the police,

did each of their rulers secretly know

they were finished – not then or that year

but in time however many they maimed,

and killed and tortured in front of cameras –

yet kept it to themselves? Did they believe

really that righteous anger would, could

be suppressed forever?

 

 

 

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