POETRY

POETRY

THE ABATTOIR AT MAZINGARBE

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

The push for Aubers Ridge had been postponed

because of rain. But the Saturday

was dry and sunny. Going up the line

in the early evening, the Munsters

stood easy at the shrine to Our Lady.

‘…in remissionem peccatorum…’

By noon, next day, nearly half were dead,

caught on the German wire Haig’s ill equipped

artillery had, once more, failed to cut.

 

In Mazingarbe, an industrial town

ten miles south, the British commandeered

the abattoir. The first to be shot at dawn

was a Munster regular from Cork.

‘…in nomine Patris…’

 

 

 

Note: An earlier version of the piece has been posted twice before on the site – in November 2012 and August 2014.

 

 

 

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POETRY

STAPLETON COTTON 1ST VISCOUNT COMBERMERE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read3.9K views

Stapleton Cotton 1st Viscount Combermere’s

equestrian statue, surrounded now

by traffic, would grace any capital.

For more than a hundred and fifty years

set before Chester Castle he rides south

towards Thomas Harrison’s Grosvenor Bridge

– once the longest single-span arch in the world –

opened by Princess Victoria.

The Viscount – soldier, politician,

diplomat – holds his feathered bicorne

at his side as if just removed in salute.

 

Though Combermere’s seat (once an abbey, now

a wedding venue) was a day’s ride away,

and Earl Grosvenor was the Roman city’s

capo di tutti capi, Chester’s

mercantile citizenry raised the cash

to have the statue designed and made

by Queen Victoria’s favourite sculptor,

Carlo Marochetti, whose Richard

Coeur De Lion holds his sword aloft

outside the Houses of Parliament.

 

However, like the Earl and the Viscount,

the merchants were knights of the chequered square,

and Stapleton Cotton – Valenciennes,

Salamanca, Bharatpur, c-in-c

West Indies then India – helped make

the British Empire safe for their dividends.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE FORK IN THE ROAD

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.8K views

They would never know that the narrow lanes –

one right, up the thickly wooded hill,

the other, following the valley’s curve,

quickly out of sight – led to the same place,

and that the few houses there were shuttered.

 

They had stopped – the diesel puttering,

the brown exhaust fouling the summer air –

in front of the triangle of long grass,

with a glass fronted shrine at its centre,

that marked the fork in the road. The officer

searched the landscape with binoculars,

quartering the maize fields on either side

then looking for movement among the trees

on the hill. They waited. The engine puttered.

They both thought, though neither could say, that

this was not where they wanted to be.

 

Drawing his revolver, the officer got out

slowly to examine the shrine. The driver

revved the engine slightly. The grass triangle

had been uncut for months. A wild flower bloomed –

and heavy rain or some animal

had flattened a narrow path to the shrine.

The fields of maize chafed in the warm soft wind.

 

The shrine was typical of the country:

a rectangular wooden box painted green

fixed to a rusted cast iron pedestal –

with something behind the small red glass door

(usually a dried flower and a bone).

The officer reached to open the door but heard

the engine revved – and returned to the cab,

placing his revolver into its holster.

 

The diesel puttered. The driver gripped the wheel.

Suddenly, round the curve of the valley road,

a white horse galloped towards them and past,

its reins whipping the dust. The officer

drew his gun. The brown exhaust fouled the air.

And the shrine exploded.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE GARIBALDI STATUE, VENICE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

Usually on a geometric plinth,

sometimes ahorse, once like Charlemagne,

here at the end of the wide, tree lined gravelled

Viale Giuseppe Garibaldi

that leads from the Giardini Pubblici,

he stands, as if on an Appenine peak,

with one of his Red Shirts below to one side.

Though probably better known in Britain

for his eponymous biscuit, the hero

of both Italian freedom and unity

faces what had once been a canal

but was made a street in his honour,

the Via Giuseppe Garibaldi.

 

The sculptor, Augusto Benvenuti,

was a local lad, a poor boy. Apprenticed

to a wood carver he learned to sculpt.

Though famous enough to be commissioned

to make Richard Wagner’s death mask he died,

in Venice, aged forty-one, destitute.

 

Garibaldi’s nickname was Il Leone,

and the head of a lion is set in the ‘rock’

now festooned in foliage. The monument

is placed in a small, railed, circular garden.

There is a crescent-shaped pool – with two carp, one

water rat, three abandoned terrapin, all

safe in obscurity.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE OUTING

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

Each Armistice Day, she remembered it.
A walk along the riverbank. Her teacher took them –
one Saturday when the hawthorn was out
and the river slow after weeks of sun –
her and three of the other older girls.
Miss Davies’ young man came too –
in his uniform, on leave from the front.

When they all rested in the shade of a willow,
he unwrapped a large bar of chocolate
slowly, looking away, or pretending to,
across the river.  Suddenly he turned.
‘Voila!’, he said, holding it out to them.
‘Pour vous. From plucky little Belgium.’

Miss Davies and her young man went and sat
at the river’s edge, their heads almost touching.
Two of her friends began whispering – another
pursed her lips and kissed the air. The others giggled.
She lay back – and squinted at the sun through the branches.
‘Look’, said one of the girls. The soldier was pretending
to dip the toe of his boot in the water.
Miss Davies laughed.

On the way back, ‘Listen’, he said, and they stopped.
On the dappled path, blocking their way,
a song thrush was striking a snail on a stone
again and again and again.

 

 

 

Note: This piece was one of the first five poems published on the site when it was launched in April 2009 and has been reposted twice. It has also been published in ‘A Jar of Sticklebacks’ – http://www.armadillocentral.com/general/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-by-david-selzer

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POETRY

THE ROPE SWING

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

i.m. Liz Stafford

 

In the crematorium I try to sit,

if I can, where I can see the lawn

sloping up towards the landscaped copse,

and, today, blue sky. I assume the dead,

even if you could, would not begrudge

this longing to be elsewhere, to be free.

 

You have prepared for your death: choosing

the readings, and the hymns any pragmatic

atheist might know, briefing the eulogist

with selected work and leisure anecdotes.

I admire such fortitude, such command.

‘…send not to know for whom the bell tolls…’

 

At the funeral of a neighbour’s son,

among the family anecdotes

was one about a rope swing his dad had made.

The young man when still a very small boy

would swing ever higher from the garden oak

over the wall, the towpath and the canal.

 

I think of that now – pretty sure, like me,

that whatever risks you took were in your head

but were no less vertiginous for that.

 

 

 

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