POETRY

POETRY

JAZZ IN ROOM M

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read944 views

i.m. Anthony (Tony) Barrell

 

‘Jazz, unlike a bucket of nails, is full of paradoxes’.

Norman Granz, sleeve note to ELLA AND LOUIS

 

During term time he had an understanding

with the prefect in charge of the tuck shop,

which was on the ground floor of the decaying

annex. His record player was kept

under the counter until each Tuesday

after school, when it would be brought up a floor

to Room M. How he had persuaded

whoever he had had to persuade

to allow his fellow scholars to listen

to jazz at all never mind unsupervised

he never said, and we never asked.

He was Le Grand Meaulnes in that grammar school

of scholarship boys – founded, as part

of the reformation, by Henry VIII,

or, rather, the strategic Thomas Cromwell,

seeing the need for serried offices of clerks.

The annex was a neglected Georgian house

clamped to the substantial sandstone gateway

of the abbey Thomas and Henry dissolved.

 

The LPs he played were his – mostly big band,

Benny Goodman to Stan Kenton but sometimes

the quintet of the Hot Club of France. He was

the pedagogue par excellence – charming,

intense, generous, a good listener

in every way. We went there to learn.

He was very much our guru,

our rabbi – with a sharp sense of humour –

and at the start of a creative lifetime,

making important things happen for others,

in print, on the radio and TV.

The Head Master, a reverend, would have

considered him ‘anti’ – which translates as

‘willing and able to enable

others to see behind the curtain’.

 

One Tuesday he played us the album

‘Drum Battle’: Ella Fitzgerald vocals,

Oscar Petersen piano, percussion

Gene Krupa versus Buddy Rich – bandleaders,

erstwhile sidemen with Goodman and Dorsey –

a Jewish American and a Polish American,

on snare, bass, tom-tom, hi-hat, cymbals,

four beats to the bar in Carnegie Hall.

 

In that shabby room, its long sash windows

filled with views unchanged for centuries

of an English provincial city,

we were jazzmen chatting between solos –

about Lionel Hampton’s purple LP,

the Duke boycotting venues in the Deep South,

Django Reinhart evading the Nazis.

 

Note: Tony Barrell – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Barrell_(broadcaster)

 

 

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POETRY

THE CYBER DEAD

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read850 views

‘Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door,’ a busker

began to sing near to the ice cream kiosk,

just after I had left the public toilet,

its adamantine urinals made

in Burnley. I walked beneath the lime trees,

along the embankment. The brown river

swirled in spate, high with rains from the remnants

of Atlantic storms breaking on shorn

and distant mountains. I thought of those dead friends –

their social media accounts intestate –

forever alive, and orbiting

eternally in cyber space, so close

yet still and always forlornly ‘Knock-knock-

knockin’ on Heaven’s door’.

 

 

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POETRY

AS IF

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read959 views

On the end wall of the erstwhile refectory

of the Convent of Santa Maria

delle Grazie, Milan – which is merely

a stone’s row from where a mob of women

mutilated Benito Mussolini

and hung his corpse from a lamp post – hangs

Leonardo Da Vinci’s THE LAST SUPPER.

 

A tourist once asked a guide three questions:

‘These are Jewish men?’ ‘This is the Passover?’

‘So where are the matzos?’

 

 

 

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POETRY

BACK INTO PARADISE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read798 views

‘They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes’.

PSALM 63, VERSE 10, KING JAMES BIBLE

 

Walking through Borough Market one Friday night,

past bagged litter, cacophonous wine bars,

themed eateries, and food waste in gutters,

I saw, trotting across Cathedral Street,

seemingly following the arrow

to the main entrance to Southwark Cathedral,

a fox – heading for its hidden earth perhaps,

on hallowed ground near Shakespeare’s grave.

 

As I made for Borough High Street – a place

of perpetual emergency sirens,

an aimless thoroughfare of dreadful nights,

and my lodgings down a yard lined with fag ends –

I thought of how the diocesan fox

had looked my way as if acknowledging

a fellowship in cunning and survival.

I assumed there was a skulk of foxes

in the graveyard, part of London’s militia

of ten thousand foxy scavengers.

 

I remembered King Lear – who, of course, did not know

how it all would end – repenting the harsh, proud

foolishness of his age, reconciling

with Cordelia, relishing their being

together in prison, finding love at last.

Only fire from heaven, he said, would part them,

and banish them ‘like foxes’. I remembered

Samson, enflaming the tails of three hundred

foxes, and sending them into the fields

of the Philistines to scorch their corn,

their olive groves, their vineyards. And I wondered then

what sort of fervent fire there would have to be

to hound us all – the biblical strongman,

the mad king, the urban fox, and me –

back into paradise.

 

Note: Now re-published in the Winter 2026 edition of Exterminating Angel.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

HARD QUESTIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read838 views

The incense trade route transported frankincense

and myrrh, saplings as well as resin,

aromatic and medicinal,

from what is now part of the Yemen

northwards along the Red Sea coast

and then north east across the Negev

to the port of Gaza and the Great Sea.

It was a twice yearly sixth month journey

for a millennium and a half.

As empires shifted the trade moved elsewhere.

 

***

 

The fabled Queen of Sheba and her

fabulous entourage of courtiers

and of camel trains carrying gold,

and spices, and precious stones,

followed most of the route on her way

to Jerusalem to surprise Solomon

in his royal citadel. She disbelieved

the tales she had heard about the king’s wisdom

and his wealth, and intended to ‘prove him

with hard questions’. He answered so well

that she gave him all of the gifts she had brought.

‘And she said to the king…the half was not told me’.

Perhaps she had just found out about his

‘seven hundred wives…three hundred concubines’.

 

***

 

Dispensing some self-righteous, PR version

of King Solomon’s ‘judgement and justice’,

and each worth considerably more than

any king’s bounty, a ballistic missile

will take ten minutes or so from the Yemen

to Israel and vice versa. Though empires shift,

and death smells of TNT and rocket fuel,

each apocalypse comes with smoke and fire,

and no answers.

 

 

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POETRY

A FEAST OF TRUMPETS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read507 views

We are breakfasting in the small summerhouse

near the high back wall of our garden,

and reflecting on a world where malice

seems at the very end of its tether,

where avarice and nonsense are esteemed,

cruelty applauded, and kindness mocked.

Though autumn has begun, the wisteria

that festoons the south side of this bower

is flowering again, the lilac-blue petals

caressing the window panes. Two bumble bees

like plump dancers flit from flower to flower

in the soft, late September sunlight –

with a robin redbreast in the olive tree,

a red admiral on the ivy.

 

The driest of summers and our brief absence

for two weeks beside the balmiest of seas

shrivelled the plant’s leaves to a papery brown.

We removed them, and watered the roots.

And suddenly the flowers began to appear –

as if the plant’s autumn and winter

had been compressed into merely weeks.

This species was originally from China,

where it still represents a catalogue

of wished-for human conditions – like

prosperity, longevity, love, and wisdom.

 

At dusk the Jewish New Year will begin,

a time of celebration, reflection, atonement,

heralded by ‘a blowing of trumpets’.

According to TikTok this year’s fanfare

of rams’ horns in a Holy Land of

more than usual pestilential

tribulations will bring forth hosts

of Christians anticipating the Rapture,

ready to rise like balloons, and be welcomed

by the god of the three peoples of The Book,

the god of mayhem, havoc, fire, and famine.

 

Meanwhile, as yet, the sky beyond the flowers,

is merely azure, and infinite,

empty of souls.

 

 

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