POETRY

POETRY

WILLIE AND THE HARE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read2K views

One had a lovely face,

And two or three had charm,

But charm and face were in vain

Because the mountain grass

Cannot but keep the form

Where the mountain hare has lain.

‘Memory,’ W.B. Yeats

 

Thomas Cubitt, London’s master builder, built

Woburn Buildings (on the Duke of Bedford’s land);

a pedestrianised street from Woburn Place

to what is now Euston Road, and abutting

St Pancras New Church with its caryatids

and ionic columns. Late Georgian London

on the up. Cubitt noted that hares came south

from Primrose Hill and from The Regent’s Park,

in the evenings, to rest on the paving stones.

 

W.B. Yeats, Willie to friends

and family, moved to the second floor

of number 18 ‘to be close to

the people’ or, rather, to further his

short-lived affair with his married mistress.

(That year Oscar Wilde chose not to cut

and run, and so found himself disgraced).

Willie noted a ‘handsome old grey hare’

resting beneath number 6’s bow window.

 

Two more London adoptees, Ezra Pound,

who brought T.S. Eliot, attended

Willie’s Monday ‘At Homes’, where Ezra

soon made himself indispensable,

dispensing his host’s Bushmills and Sweet Aftons,

then becoming his secretary,

marrying his mistress’s daughter

and dumping her in Paris with their son –

meanwhile making Yeats a modern poet.

 

Two geniuses and their mentor, mere

human beans all three, ambitious, amorous,

apprehensive, came and went – past

the shoemaker’s shop on the ground floor,

the workman and his family on the first,

and gossiped about art beneath the attic

where a pedlar painted water colours.

All are lost like the hares. Perhaps the bricks,

the pavings remember.

 

 

 

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POETRY

TAVISTOCK SQUARE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.8K views

 

“Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim,’Good God! Here I am again!’…?” Virginia Woolf

The Woolfs’ house was on the south side of the Square.

From there the couple ran the Hogarth Press.

The place was razed by a stray bomb in the Blitz –

but they had moved, the year the war started,

to their house in Sussex near the river Ouse.

In the Square’s gardens there is: a cherry tree

planted in remembrance of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki; a stone memorial

to conscientious objectors; a bronze statue

of Ghandi sitting cross legged in his dhoti;

and much else that speaks softly for peace,

for tolerance, for charity, for hope.

Hasib Hussain’s target was the Northern Line

from King’s Cross – but it had been suspended

earlier that morning. He tried to phone

the other three – but got no answers.

He boarded the number 30 somewhere

on Euston Road. The bus – the first three bombs

having already jammed the traffic –

was diverted down Upper Woburn Place

into the Square. Outside the BMA

he killed himself, and thirteen strangers.

He was 18, an FE student,

a member of  his local cricket

and football teams. Late that night his parents,

worried he had not returned from his trip

to London with his friends, rang Scotland Yard.

Virginia, two years after they had moved,

walked into the Ouse. Her body was found

some weeks later. A bronze bust of the writer

is in the south west corner of the Gardens.

‘Am I alone in my egotism…?’

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POETRY

THE AMBIGUITY OF THEFT

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

Two of the rooms in the British Museum

I always visit are numbers 7

and 8, ‘Assyria: Nimrud’. Named,

in modern times, for the Biblical Nimrod

the three thousand year old city of Kalhu

is twenty miles south of Mosul. On display

from the palace of Ashurnasirpal

are gypsum panels, carved reliefs, products –

faultlessly sculpted – from a master’s workshop.

They are, for the most part, pristine, and portray

absolute kingship, its circumstance, pomp,

and prisoners’ heads severed after battle.

So-called Islamic State – that outfit

of aliases, fanatics duped

by gangsters – does not distinguish between

flesh and stone, has destroyed on video

what little remains of Assyria

that is not preserved in Bloomsbury,

in that mausoleum of necromancy,

in that temple to kleptomania,

in that exquisite cache.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ENGLISH JOURNEY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

I have made my English journey – by rail,

Chester to Euston return – maybe,

on average, three times a year since I was four.

 

It is like revisiting a ragged

museum of serendipitous

keepsakes: Canada Geese on Cheshire ponds;

GEC become Alstom in Stafford:

wind turbines and mobile phone towers

jostling radio masts near Rugby;

concrete cows in Milton Keynes; Ovaltine

in Kings Langley; Watford’s mosques;

and, anywhere, marshalling yards of

derelict rolling stock, broken factories,

gaudy retail parks, cramped estates, distant

mansions, acres of subsidised rape

and denatured fields of maize stubble –

no north/south divide, just comfort or neglect.

 

I think of London as we begin to slow.

The city of power not poverty –

its lure, its promise; Larkin’s ‘postal districts

packed like squares of wheat’; Cobbett’s ‘Great Wen’;

the nation’s sinkhole – and its flywheel

driving riches, driving penury,

as if everywhere else were its hinterland.

 

The rails, for the most part, follow the canals –

Grand Union, Oxford, Trent & Mersey,

Shropshire Union. They follow the land’s

contours – and bring me home to a place

that is not far from the edge of England,

where I am minutes from a sight of mountains.

 

 

 

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POETRY

FLYING SOUTH

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

Ascending south east from Manchester, over

Eyam, the ‘plague village’, towards the Wash;

cruising over the Channel, observing

the shipping below me with wonder like some

latter day Bleriot; then Rotterdam’s docks

and the Rhine; sun glinting momentarily

like fireflies, and I am nonchalant

as Icarus, mindful as Daedalus,

noting place names freighted with histories;

past Munich, and the bared Austrian Alps,

then due south along the Balkan Mountains,

smoke drifting north from polluting fires,

roads following the contours, rivers the colour

of onyx; then the coast, and sea water

the westing sun has turned to mercury,

with Mycenae rightwards, leftwards Troy;

descending over the Dodecanese

to Cyprus – island of Aphrodite,

wine and olive trees, worked out copper mines,

abandoned churches – with its new money

and its old divisions.

 

 

 

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POETRY

PAPHOS: THE OLD HARBOUR

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

The thirteenth century’s major earthquake

resulted in a tsunami that buried

a bishop and his congregation, razed

the castle – a Byzantine fort – broke

the Roman breakwater, leaving rocks

like cracked teeth, rendered the harbour useless

for sea going vessels and reduced this once

capital city to a fishing village

which the odd traveller would visit

for the lustrous mosaics nearby.

 

On the corniche, watched by strolling tourists

and two armed Port & Marine policemen,

museum attendants on their lunch break

and taxi drivers between fares line fish.

The breakwater is like a uneven row

of shark fins against the silver waters.

 

The Greek Colonels invaded Cyprus,

in my thirties, then the Turkish ones. Atrocities

were committed, old neighbourhoods deserted.

In my youth, near here, in a villa

with a high white walled garden, British

Military Intelligence attempted

to deter young would-be terrorists

and waterboarded Cypriot teenagers.

The impromptu fishermen reel in

occasional gilt head bream and red mullet.

Whoever holds the rod, it seems, or pen

gets to make history.

 

 

 

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