POETRY

POETRY

AN AFTERNOON IN MAY

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.4K views

By our side gate the old laburnum – whose wood,

in time, may make a chanter or a flute –

is in bloom. I look up through its branches.

There is a little azure and smidgens

of green – and droplets, ringlets, links, chains

of cascading yellow, a torrent of gold.

 

***

 

Our Victorian neighbourhood fills

with the machined roar of twin turbofans.

An Airbus Beluga – more Arctic whale

than Caspian sturgeon – with cargoes

of worked metal from Toulouse, banks low

over the churchyard’s antique horse chestnuts.

 

***

 

A heron, crossing from one river

to another, beats above our chimney pots,

and three swifts, harbingers, curve through the blue.

A blackbird, perched on the laburnum’s

aureate halcyon canopy,

imbues the street with song.

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
5 Comments
POETRY

THE MUSEUMS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.1K views

For Sizwe Vilakazi

 

ROBBEN ISLAND, CAPE TOWN

 

Except when the Atlantic fog surprises,

from high ground in the city the island

is present like a leviathan,

its lights at night like white phosphorous,

a place of banishment since the first ships,

among seals and penguins.

 

DISTRICT SIX, CAPE TOWN

 

Razing its streets, clearing this cosmopolis

of Asians, atheists, Blacks, booksellers,

Buddhists, Christians, Coloureds, cooks, Hindus, Jews,

musicians, Muslims, seafarers, Whites,

this is what it was all about – the racial

myths, the scorn, the humiliation,

the torture, the killings – to justify

the theft of property.

 

APARTHEID, FREEDOM PARK, JOHANNESBURG

 

Beneath the Pillars of the Constitution,

in the gardens the weaver birds are knitting

their elaborate nests from grass and reeds

precariously over water.

 

Inside is the Mercedes workers hand built

for Mandela, and a BAE designed

troop-carrying Casspir, mine and bullet proof,

to patrol the townships.

 

HECTOR PIETERSON, ORLANDO WEST, SOWETO

 

When the school children took to the dirt streets

in their uniforms and walked as one

towards the dogs and the guns and the police,

did each of their rulers secretly know

they were finished – not then or that year

but in time however many they maimed,

and killed and tortured in front of cameras –

yet kept it to themselves? Did they believe

really that righteous anger would, could

be suppressed forever?

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

HIGHWATER

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

The incoming tide brings shoals of mackerel fry.

Herring gulls, perhaps a hundred, more,

young among them in their mottled plumage,

are yelling at the water’s edge, feeding

in frenzy as the small waves scatter.

Far out on the low, narrow, wooden jetty

my small family leans over to marvel

at the fishes before landfall. At my back

is the white crescent of hotels, the town,

the estuary, the mountains, sun setting.

 

They cross the beach, granddaughter running ahead,

towards me, as the frenetic birds

yell and flap. Along the horizon,

the forest of white wind turbines slowly

disappears, becomes a blurred prism of green,

ivory, red – like an attenuated,

distant, gaudy city.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

‘MARILYN MONROE READING ULYSSES’: EVE ARNOLD (1955)

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.1K views

After the shoot on Long Island’s Cedar Beach

they drove next to a local playground.

While Eve loaded her camera, Marilyn sat

on some play equipment and read a book –

her worn copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,

which she kept in her car, and had been reading

for some time, often aloud to get it’s sense.

(She looks to be about nine tenths through

so into Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated

soliloquy of love and longing).

This photograph of a pretty woman

in her late twenties, tanned, wearing short shorts

and a stripy top, reading an egghead’s book

was greeted with incredulity, “Oh yeah!” –

and, more harshly, “The thinking man’s shiksa!“.

 

Among the four hundred and thirty books

auctioned after her death were works by Flaubert,

Freud, Aristotle, Housman, as well as Joyce.

She was on Long Island that day visiting

her friend the poet Norman Rosten,

one of the last people she spoke to

the day before she died. Long before they met

he wrote, ‘Morning meets memory/and kills it’.

 

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

UNDER THE LIME TREES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.9K views

For Mike Rogerson

 

The layout of our local park was finished

the year my mother was born, the year

before the Great War was started, and named

for Alexandra Saxe-coburg and Gotha

née Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg,

widow of the late King. An avenue

of lime trees – and a single row along

another path – was planted. My mother,

the Spring of the year she was war-widowed,

pushed me in my pram beneath them.

 

Berlin’s Unter Den Linden avenue –

that stretches from the Brandenburg Gate

to the razed imperial palace –

was named for a medieval poem of love

and lust that became a song. ‘Under

the lime… sweetly sang the nightingale…’

As the Red Army encircled the city,

the last of the trees was felled for firewood.

 

In the scullery of the house we shared

with my mother’s mother, her two sisters

and their step-brother (gassed at Ypres),

the draining board and the mangles’ rollers

were made from lime, and the piano’s keys

in the back room. Under the lime trees

in the park my granddaughter races,

still carefree of history’s absurd

ironies – and, oh, so many loving ghosts.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

THE DIGITAL MUSE: THE POET AS WEBSITE OWNER

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read2.2K views

The site was launched in April 2009. A regular reader, Kira Somach, gave the site the following endorsement (in an email to me a couple of years ago), ‘Most people enjoy shopping delivered to their doorstep. I enjoy Selzer Poetry delivered to mine’.  A pithy, witty rationale!

 

The idea for the site came out of discussions with a friend and ex-colleague, John Plummer. He shared the development of his book, ISLANDS AND LIFELINES: EXPLORING THE DRAMATIC FRINGES OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND, with me and we talked about self-publishing. I raised the notion of his doing so via the web, but he opted quite understandably for the conventional route. It took me some to realise that, since I had thought the notion was in principle a good one, I ought for once to take my own advice!

 

The site was designed to my specifications by Sam Hutchinson. We seem to have done the job well as the site has only required some tweaking since its launch – and feedback suggests it is generally user friendly.

 

I had anticipated that the content of the site would for the most part be work I had already produced – and that once the work was posted I might add the occasional piece. I had not thought beyond that and had certainly not  anticipated that one of the effects of creating the site would be that I would write more. In fact, I’ve written more poems since its inception ten years ago than in the previous fifty years!

 

I suspect there are two main reasons for this. I now have a group of regular readers – from all continents except Antarctica! Some are people I have known for many years, others I have reconnected with through the site and some I’ve never actually met and probably never will.

 

The other reason is that I have consolidated what I might call a blogging style of poetics, a style I realise I aspired to when I was a young man but, to quote Henri Matisse, ‘Even if I could have done when I was young what I’m doing now – and it is what I dreamed of then – I wouldn’t have dared.’

 

The only significant editorial decision I have made since the site launched has been in relation to the use of pictorial images – diagrams, maps, paintings, photographs etc. – with the text. Originally I thought their use essential as in the print medium – to illustrate and to leaven the text. But I eventually realised their use in this context was redundant – primarily because my poetry has always been built on imagery, figurative or literal. Duh! as they say. If I were capable of being embarrassed at my age I would be!

 

Mentioning age reminds me that another of my regular readers, the writer and critic Mary Clark, wrote in a review of A JAR OF STICKLEBACKS, ‘As an avid reader of his blog, I believe in the last few years he has reached a maturity as a poet that sets him apart’. Even if I could have done when I was young what I’m doing now…

 

David Selzer, May 2019

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments