POETRY

POETRY

PAINTING PARADISE

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.1K 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 read2.1K 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 read2K 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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POETRY

ACROSS THE ESTUARY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2K 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 read1.5K 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 read3.1K 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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