POETRY

POETRY

ACROSS THE ESTUARY

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

The beds of varicoloured reeds, fields almost,

stretch north and south along this bank for miles,

and westwards, nearly to Wales, across the wide,

silted river. Unseen marsh creatures scarcely

disturb the grasses. Egrets and herons

fly in and out of hidden lagoons.

Before silt, from here, the Dublin packet sailed –

with G.F. Handel and Jonathan Swift.

On the opposite shore are the ruins

of Flint Castle where Richard was dethroned –

‘…night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.’

Sun catches a window on Halkyn Mountain.

 

This year marks the first centenary

of the Amritsar massacre, the second

of Peterloo – but even now there are

doubters, equivocators, who minimise

the carnage, exculpate the perpetrators.

 

In the small car park behind us a car door

opens briefly – the radio announces,

in a public school accent, that there will be

never ending dystopia ‘until’

and ‘unless’. Today is the first of summer,

hot, windless, with dragonflies and bees

abounding. This remorseless marshland is

unequivocal – earth and vegetation

are ruthless, immaculate remembrancers.

 

 

 

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POETRY

OUT OF THE EARTH

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

The park’s diagonal avenue of limes

is in leaf. A warm southwesterly

billows through the foliage like falling surf,

like the tumultuous rushing of flames.

I watch you walk away under the trees,

and disappear into the green shade.

 

On the path directly opposite,

across an uncluttered expanse of grass,

you reappear some moments later,

undeterred by a surge of carefree cyclists

taking short cuts, or self-absorbed dog walkers.

You vanish beyond the wind-swept tennis courts.

 

As if I were some ancient and complacent

Orpheus I know that I shall see you –

walking beneath the tumult of the leaves,

sure-footed on the airy ground – and feel

that wave of love like fire.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read2.9K views

Impelled by Wall Street and the Pentagon,

and the vanity of Presidents,

the astronauts had seemed to sail beyond

experience – but we TV millions watched

live ‘Old Glory’ stiffen above us;

heard Nixon speak; saw Aldrin at attention.

Meanwhile, oblivious, the Vietcong

were waiting patiently in their tunnels.

 

***

 

The day of the moon landing we walked up

Bidston Hill to the Observatory,

where my great grandfather – who had captained

coffin ships to Boston – in his old age

studied the tides. Our little girl played on slabs

of ice-smoothed sandstone, and recited

‘The moon has a face like the clock in the hall’.

Birkenhead below lay sharply in sunlight –

maritime, sooty, long in decline.

 

***

 

Above the scrofulous cities of the earth

the contraptions spin like discarded coins.

We are trashing the universe, and time

is no shorter than it ever was for us

of the broken countries, which corrupt,

like mouths of rotten teeth, all they encroach.

 

 

Note: ‘SAME OLD, SAME OLD’ is a re-working of ‘NEW HEROES’ written in August and September 1969 – first published in Phoenix (Winter 1972) and re-published in Elsewhere (1973).

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POETRY

DAY BREAKING

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

Sleepless I opened the slats of the bathroom’s

white Venetian blind expecting darkness

but the eastern sky over our neighbours’ roofs

was already pale, and the Morning Star glowed

gilded, and I suddenly remembered

being in the yard of an old coaching inn,

standing by a sandstone horse trough still used

for hunts, its water frozen so deeply

I could only crack the surface with my fist.

Behind the inn farmland – ploughed, hoar frosted,

horse trampled – stretched unfenced over a rise.

 

Disconnected shames and regrets, that restless,

anxious night, had jerked through my synapses

like shunted railway wagons. Seeing the star,

watching the day becoming lucent,

I wondered how the memory of

something so seemingly innocent,

and so soon over, should have lasted

and returned unprompted like some sort of

revelation: remembering the ice

in the trough, and, stretching out of sight,

those ridden, roughshod fields.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ORGANISED CRIMES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K 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

WALKING HOME

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

We talked of those we had worked with that day,

and those with whom we would work again.

We passed, as always, so many walking,

as we left Chiawelo in Soweto.

We were returning to New Redruth,

where the Cornish tin miners were exiled

to grow the gold reefs and shine the diamonds.

We joined the steady rush hour traffic

on the N12 South. Passing the Gleneagles

shopping mall, I saw, on the hard shoulder

of the opposite carriageway, a man,

barefoot, bearded, young,  literally in rags –

his shirt and cut-offs multi-coloured strips –

striding north calmly, purposefully.

 

Maybe my companions saw him too.

If so we never spoke of it, perhaps

not having the words or the heart to talk

of that man, travelling as if he had walked

on the same road from its beginnings

in the Western Cape and would walk to its

ending in Mpumalanga, like one

walking home after work.

 

 

 

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