POETRY

POETRY

THE GRAIN LOFT

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

There are gaps between the Velux windows

and the blinds – intentional, of course,

to let in shafts of sunlight. At night

the sodium street lights make arrow shapes

on the bedroom’s walls. Raindrops the flood tide brings

slide like orangey, silvery glitter balls –

almost the colour of the wheat grains

that would have been piled on tarpaulins to dry

on the oak floorboards of this converted loft.

 

Thinking the street lights daylight herring gulls

halloo all night from chimney tops and gables.

Through the bathroom skylight constellations

glitter over the unpolluted mountains.

In this erstwhile granary a poet

and his muse are sleeping  – like Larkin’s

effigies who ‘would not think to lie so long’

or Thomas’s ‘two old kippers in a box’ –

as gulls call and stars turn.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ARS POETICA

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

For Keith Johnson

 

‘Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.’ Carl Sandburg

 

I presume, since Carl Sandburg was a poet

of the railroad and the five-and-dime,

of prairie skies and the remarkableness

of the people, they are American

biscuits – that cross between scone and bannock –

to mop up the gravy from your beans

on the Chisholm Trail to Dodge City.

 

According to Homer, among others,

Hyakinthos, a Spartan prince of great

beauty, much fancied by Apollo,

had his skull split. Zephyrus had thrown

a vindictive discus. From the young man’s

purple blood bloomed the flower, his initial

traceable amongst the ornate petals.

 

Love and lard, flour and ferocity,

blossoms and buttermilk, salt and stories –

poetry is an amalgam, a mixture

of use and wonderment.

 

 

Note: Keith Johnson

 

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POETRY

WHAT IS IT THAT STARTS A POEM?

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

Although it is a cold evening,

down by one of the fishhouses

an old man sits netting…  

AT THE FISHHOUSES Elizabeth Bishop

 

What is it that starts a poem? What rupture –

a fish tugging at a hook? What rapture –

the seventh wave breaking as it should?

Consider Elizabeth Bishop:

fatherless at one; her mother certified

four years later; taken from her grandparents

in Nova Scotia by her father’s parents

in Massachusetts; a Vassar girl

with a private income; a painter

as well as a poet. What was it that cold

evening on the fish quay in Nova Scotia

that started her poem? A favourite seal

bobbing off shore, to which she sang Baptist hymns?

The Atlantic? The herring scales and the cod

that adorned every plank? The Lucky Strikes

she smoked with the old man mending his nets

‘in the gloaming almost invisible’,

her grandfather’s friend?

 

 

 

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POETRY

PAINTING PARADISE

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2K views

If I were a painter – and I would have

so many memorable titles – I would paint

your garden in all its rooms and seasons:

across the high back wall spring’s coral pink

clematis; summer’s sword-leaved, red-flamed

crocosmia by the aquamarine

gazebo; the white, weathered table and chairs

and the acer on the dark-brick terrace;

plants inherited, self-seeded, handed on

in stewardship – a world compendium.

You are the architect, builder, labourer –

and only begetter: ‘Sylvia Among

Her Sonnets Without Words’.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ORGANISED CRIMES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K 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

ALL THIS IS BUT A DREAM

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.8K views

For Barbara and John Huddart

 

On this calm summer evening the North Sea falls

unheard on the wide sands below the castle

in whose inner ward the play is set – and we

(an eclectic collection of friends)

have brought folding chairs, prosecco, pop,

and fish suppers from Seahouses nearby

along this coast of raiders and saints.

 ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite,’

says Juliet, a canny lass – though all

four players are canny lasses in this

very British, outdoor, touring ‘tale of woe’.

 

In the interval the sun sets like fire,

a titian furnace stretched across The Borders,

out-performing any artifice –

and when, in the last act, beyond the charmed

arena of spots and floods, night falls

and the air chills, bats, out of ancient crevices,

flitter between the words and over the shore.

 

 

Note: See The Handlebards.

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