POETRY

POETRY

OCTOBER 4TH

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2K views

My first, and, so far, only – and that minor –

cardiac infarction fell on the date

of the sixty fourth anniversary

of The Battle of Cable Street, when the Jews

and the Irish stuffed Mosley and his Blackshirts,

the Old Wykehamist and his numbskulls,

the Daily Mail’s darling, a Great White Hope.

 

***

 

The consultant – of the old, aloof school,

and treated with awe by theatre staff –

liked Benny Goodman for accompaniment.

On a vast black and white monitor I watched

as, through my groin, the catheter sidled

the arterial highways to my heart.

How essentially anonymous we are!

They could have been anybody’s body parts!

I turned away, listened to the King of Swing’s

version of Bessie Smith’s ‘After You’ve Gone’ –

‘some day when you grow lonely your heart will break…’

 

***

 

Today is the eighty fourth and the nineteenth

respectively. There is no need, perhaps,

for barricades, and I have almost learned

the lessons of my heart.

 

 

 

Note: the poem was first published on 4.10.19 on Facebook .

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POETRY

FROM THE PERCH ROCK CAUSEWAY, NEW BRIGHTON

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

A small boy is digging in the Autumn sand.

Ships pass in the deep channel. Someone

has made a stand of driftwood twigs topped

with modest baubles. Directly below us

on the sandstone rocks is a dead buzzard

spread eagled – yes, almost literally

the right word – its head gone or hidden,

its exposed viscera gnawed, its talons

limp. We are humans therefore forensic

so discuss the causes of the bird’s demise

and mutilation: low flying aircraft, rats?

Some spring tide will lift whatever remains

of the magnificent black tipped wingspan

out into the oceans.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE FIVE GIANTS

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.2K views

Walking down Renshaw Street from ‘Rumpelstiltskin’

at the Unity then along Bold Street,

with its strolling crowds and varied eateries,

to Central Station, thinking of spinning gold

from straw, we pass beggars in doorways.

‘What are they doing?’ our granddaughter asks.

We explain. ‘Why don’t they get jobs?’ We explain.

 

My mother would tell me how, when she moved

to London before the war to be a nurse,

she was appalled by the rough sleepers

on the benches along the Thames Embankment.

In the depressed provinces presumably

there were enough workhouses to hide them.

There being no workhouses under Thatcher

and too few shelters they were everywhere

from twilight onwards, androgynous bundles

in the world’s fifth largest economy.

Now they have returned exactly like

their forebears in the largest empire since Rome’s.

They are dragon’s teeth. Where is our shame, our fear?

 

The gusts of wind, that fling the scattered rain

against the panes and flail the apple tree –

which jerks as if a frantic, shaken doll –

are lowing in the chimney like an owl.

I draw the blinds as the twilight goes,

switch on the laptop and begin to write,

thinking of those who are without – homeless,

hungry, thirsty – no more than a mile

let alone a continent away.

 

Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, Idleness –

Beveridge’s gargantua – are alive,

well, and stalking in our city centres,

in run down estates with abandoned gardens,

in bed-and-breakfasts in cul-de-sac towns

with shut-up shops and rusting factories.

Spin as we may, stamp as we might, marvels

and wonders outsmart facts. ‘The needy

and the poor have only themselves to blame,’

say the sassy and the rich. Our consciences

have fallen among thieves.

 

 

 

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POETRY

WINTERING

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

Pink-footed geese are wintering on the marshes

west of here – flocks from Spitzbergen, Iceland,

Greenland. This late October morning

the garden is full of noises: the trimming

and shaping of hedges, bushes, trees,

the blowing and gathering of leaves –

and high cries as a skein flies eastwards

to feed on wheat stalks in the stubble fields.

 

The afternoon is disturbed by sirens –

not fire or police or ambulance.

There have been explosions somewhere north

we are informed – but all is well. At twilight,

as usual, directly overhead

the geese, in their centuries, return,

cries like ululations.

 

 

 

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POETRY

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.5K views

i.m. John Wareham

 

The tide of chance may bring
Its offer; but nought avails it!

THE OPPORTUNITY Thomas Hardy

 

Each week on Tuesday promptly at seven –

chicken curry and chips from Barry Wong’s

on West Derby Road at the ready –

he and I would turn on the TV

in our rented rooms to watch Hughie Greene’s

‘Opportunity Knocks’.  It was an hour –

including adverts – of metaphors

of the mid-sixties: kitsch; schmaltz; condescension;

nudge-nudge; the cruelty of class; fifteen

seconds of fame; occasional talents.

 

We had no doubt we were poets – actual

not aspiring. Would we settle for minor

recognition – or would only major count?

How this would happen we never discussed.

Maybe we hoped we would be discovered

like others in their twenties in the city!

 

I can see him now chortling at the absurd –

his laughter bubbling, his kindly eyes gleeful.

He was an admirer of Thomas Hardy,

ever the collector of the bathos

of pretentiousness and misfortune.

He told me tales about the writer’s heart.

Hardy had willed, though an atheist,

his body be buried in the churchyard

of the village in which he had been born.

But his young widow was strong-armed by the Dean

of Westminster Abbey. Her husband’s ashes

were interred in Poets’ Corner near Dickens’.

His heart, however, was preserved, and borne

in a biscuit tin – Huntley & Palmers

Bath Olivers, it was claimed – from Paddington

or Waterloo to Dorchester then Stinsford.

One tale had the heart buried in the tin.

Another, the tin being on the grave digger’s

kitchen table with, for some reason, the lid

off, maintained the family cat ate it.

 

He published little. Re-reading what he wrote

when we lodged together in Liverpool

I am shocked by the matureness of his talent,

and his ability to make the mundane

original, significant, portentous:

Spareness is the point.

November’s manifest in skies of ash,

Branches whittled by the edge

Of winter, the parkland quite

Quit of final birds.

And how his, over years, has shaped my work,

like an underground, uncharted watercourse.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE POET’S EYE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.4K views

Maya Angelou would pronounce ‘poetry’

with each syllable given equal, gentle

weight, and the first two clear as a call, a soft

sonorousness as if water spoke.

 

***

 

There are few words in the English lexicon

with so many, diverse, Attic meanings

as ‘poet’: maker, inventor, composer,

speech writer, legislator, author:

images of workshops, and lecterns;

chambers with high ceilings and long windows;

the law’s austere and tempered modalities;

stanzas memorised then taught by rote;

strings of characters laid every way;

the declamations at gatherings,

or in the mind’s crowded, private silences.

 

***

 

Although partially obscured by leaves,

when it is dark enough, solar-powered lights,

strung across the Japanese cherry, switch on –

like fireflies, like paper lanterns soundless

on deep waters, floating, flickering, long, long

after we are sleeping.

 

 

 

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