POETRY

POETRY

MUCH THAT HAPPENS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read551 views

Much that happens everywhere leaves no record:

the crayfish in the shallows beneath the bridge

briefly in July; the sudden gust of wind that shakes

the ancient palm beside the tennis courts;

the fresh paw print drying on the fence panel

where a fox had clambered up at dawn;

in the rough lane of earth and flints, the litter

of sweet chestnuts from the overhanging trees,

and violets flowering on the banks;

the horses uneasy in the stable

as September lightning fills the valley;

the narrow river rumbling with rain;

on the patio’s wrought-iron table

an empty glass trembling.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

THE HEADLAND

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read494 views

Beside the steep, rough pathway to the headland

blackberries are purpling. As we pass,

stone chats – with their melodiously

metallic call – rise from feasting on the fruits.

Once through the kissing-gate at the top

we are on the smooth turf shorn by walkers,

sheep and winds. At sea level the bay

seemed crystalline, jade. Up here the sea

is a lexicon of blues. The horizon –

empty of shipping and coasts – is a curve

of geometric perfection. The weather

is still, but the waters shift, ripple, swell.

There is a pre-human silence here – the airs,

the tides lapping at the cavernous cliffs

below. A pod of dolphins breaks the surface.

A pair of gannets dives into a darker shade

of water that may be a shoal of fish.

Later, we will pick some blackberries

as we descend the path, scattering

the clamorous stone chats.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

CONSIDER THE LITTLE EGRET

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read741 views

A little egret – elegant, self-absorbed

in its white solitude, its pale yellow beak

poised – is stalking crustaceans along

the low water margins of these mundane straits,

with their pleasure cruises and mussel dredging.

It is a native now not a renegade

from the storied Nile, the intemperate south.

 

Beyond the waters, high mountain ranges

fill the horizon. Two valleys split them –

one wooded, with a waterfall, wild ponies;

the other hanging, deep, steep sided.

In the foothills are sheep runs and stone walls –

above, an ancient caldera, and peaks

we cannot see from here. These featureless

hectares of wilderness – lavender, lilac,

mauve, as the light changes – somebody owns.

 

Nobody owns the little egret.

Here it has no natural predators –

no lurking crocodiles or aggressive

hippopotami – only perhaps

the polluted tides, the dieseled waves

it carefully navigates. We go

where we can go. We are what we are.

How free a spirit the little egret seems –

from guilt and hope and love!

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

PROSPECTS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.1K views

A house and high-walled garden occupy

nearly all of the old Lifeboat Station’s yard.

All that remains of its shed and the ramp

down into the inlet are the stumps

of the wooden supports set in concrete blocks –

both wood and concrete are ragged, wrecked, sea-worn.

 

On what litte remains of the yard

are two benches in recycled plastic

with small, faux-brass plaques – practical

and altruistic memento mori.

Behind them is the garden wall, hidden now

completely by a dense bank of hebe,

that has grown from the garden over the wall.

 

In decline as farmland is subdued,

there is a small flock of starlings in the hebe,

grazing on the insects the plant attracts.

I remember the swirling clouds of

constellations across fields and hedgerows,

and in the natureless centres of cities.

The congregation in the hebe, which has

been chattering with exultation,

goes quiet for no apparent reason,

and then suddenly begins again –

like a multitude of whisperings.

 

Like all prospects the view from here is

ambivalent: gone, like the lifeboats,

are sea baths, hotel, fishing village –

somewhere once worthy of sepia postcards –

replaced by converted cottages,

and new build all the way to the coastal road

and above along the low line of hills –

ex-pats and holiday lets. In the inlet

below, a boy on a paddle board signals

to imagined comrades. Eastwards is the sea,

today merely murmuring, violet where clouds pass –

in the depths porpoise and dolphin dive.

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

THE SILENCE OF THE MOON

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read4.7K views

For Gerald Kelly

 

In 1918 W.B. Yeats published

a set of metaphysical essays

on the nature of being and art:

PER AMICA SILENTIA DE LUNAE.

The first sentence of one of the essays

reads as follows: ‘We make out of the quarrel

with others, rhetoric, but of

the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’.

 

***

 

The school I attended had been founded

by Henry VIII – or, rather, his fixer,

Thomas Cromwell – from some of the riches

acquired through the Reformation of the Church

and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Such schools were focussed on the training of clerks,

and their medium of instruction was Latin.

 

Some centuries later the Latin set text

we studied was Book II of Virgil’s AENEID,

in which the Greeks emerge from the wooden horse

to ravage the sleeping city of Troy

‘per amica silentia de lunae’,

in the friendly silence of the moon.

 

***

 

Despite the title the essays make no mention

of the ten-year siege of Troy or its fall.

Perhaps the title was to please his patroness,

Lady Gregory, another with

mystical leanings – for, like her, Yeats

believed in the divinity of the moon.

 

The Prologue to the essays was written

in May 1917. Yeats writes

of walking with a friend the summer before

in Calvados, Normandy, and how

the ideas in the essays were forming then.

Curious that a poet who could write

about ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’

makes no mention in prose of the young men

dead and dying on the Western Front

a couple of hundred miles away.

‘…out of our quarrels…’

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

DO NO HARM

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read5.8K views

Dr Hassam Idris Abu Safiya,

paediatrician and neonatologist,

Director of Kamal Adnan Hospital,

Beit Lahia, Gaza, was kidnapped.

 

He was summoned by loud hailer. Someone –

a colleague perhaps – photographed him,

in his white coat, walking carefully

and decisively through rubble

towards an IDF Merkava tank.

 

Since then he has been imprisoned without charge;

savagely beaten; malnourished; denied

medication; and a change of clothes.

 

***

 

Will history judge these times as a

categorically defining moment?

The dichotomy, disjunction seems clear:

are you for humanity or hatred?

There are those who care, and those who do not;

those who try do something, anything,

to make a difference; and those who

trim, lie, exult. The Talmud tells us –

and the Koran echoes the sentiment –

‘Who saves one life saves all’.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment