POETRY

POETRY

THE APPLE ORCHARDS OF BEIT LAHIA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read547 views

‘The Carpet Bombing of Hamburg and Dresden’,

‘The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki’, ‘October 7th

and the War on Gaza’, might be chapters

in a book of moral tales, concerning

human ingenuity and indifference.

 

***

 

After the Pharaohs came the Romans, and later

the Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British.

The orchards remained untouched – fruited each year

abundantly. High dunes protected the trees

from the winds off the sea, the sandy clay soil

nourished the roots, and families tended them,

harvesting each apple as if it were

alive and crystal. Now, in no time at all,

not any time at all, they are gone

under rubble and dust – aeons wasted

of sunshine and nurture.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

AMONG THE MUSES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.3K views

As city ramparts and castle keeps do, so

civic building make statements – like that Attic,

Victorian temple in central London,

that bastion of imperial grandeur,

the British Museum, built to exhibit

stolen goods, and colonise the Muses,

designed by someone with the surname Smirke,

with the profits from coal, steam, and the Slave Trade.

 

Along its entire front elevation,

which includes two wings, is a wide, high

arcade whose open side is supported by

twenty four fluted Doric columns.

In the arcade, at appropriate

intervals for quiet and privacy,

are surprisingly comfortable wooden seats,

ergonomically and otherwise ideal

for ancients on a hot, humid, windless day

in late August London – while family

join the flocks, hordes of visitors to see

mummy cloths, and fragments of clay tablets.

 

The seat we have is probably the best

in the city. Across the courtyard

through the railings are plane trees in full leaf,

and red double decker buses and black cabs

jammed on Great Russell Street – which, like all

the streets and squares in the neighbourhood,

is named for an English aristocrat.

We observe the queue at the main gate –

multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, like London

with its more than three hundred languages,

a rich, ironic legacy of Empire.

 

The Museum – from the Greek mouseion,

‘seat of the Muses’ – is dressed in Portland Stone

quarried by convicts from Portland gaol Dorset.

There is no muse of architecture, nor

of prisoners or slaves, so I shall invoke

Clio, the muse of History, with her

open book and her clock!

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE OLD SEA BATHS, PARKGATE…

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.1K views

…is now a bosky car park – owned and maintained

by the borough council, and enhanced

by two charities: one for birds, the other

for history and the built environment.

Over the remains of the wall along

what was once the seaward side of the baths

is a belvedere across bird-teeming hectares

of reeds and runnels, and, beyond, the long

low mauve and lilac of Halkyn Mountain.

Though no Ur or Babylon, this small space

and its short history is a metaphor

for humankind’s enterprising and

egregious journey to date through the cosmos.

 

At the head of the Dee estuary were

salt marshes with a navigable channel

through to the international port of Chester.

The marshes were drained, filled and the land

‘reclaimed’ – as if the sea had stolen it –

to build ships, and make chains and anchors.

Silt began to block the channel so the river

was canalised – which has caused the east coast

of the estuary to silt and become

marshland. As the hectares of reeds became

multitudes making the sea a distant,

occasional thing the baths had to close.

 

They were most popular in the ‘Thirties,

despite the Depression and the long grey lines

of unemployed men in flat caps. Bathers

came via the railway – now gone –

or by car. There was parking for a thousand

Rileys, and Rovers, and Singers, the sun

reflecting from their bonnets in fields

next to the baths, and now pastoral again.

And, like any ancient civilisation,

on a ruined wall is a graffito:

in traditionally executed signwriting –

with a ‘Thirties’ three dimensional font,

and gentle shades of blue and of green –

‘The Old Sea Baths’.

 

Note: The post was amended on 6.5.26. While poems are not intended to be documents of record they should not be careless with facts. The original title was ‘The Old Seawater Baths, Parkgate’ and there was no reference to signwriting.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

GRAND DESIGNS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read947 views

Herons and egrets rise from the same shared ground –

a silted tidal estuary – rise

among expanses of marshland grasses,

vivid as shamrock, darker than samphire;

fly north on measured wing beats towards the sea,

to fish where the tide is slowly ebbing.

 

Beside the dirt path in the wild border

are campion, vetch, and bird’s foot trefoil –

scatterings of gold and purple and pink

and ancient names among the stinging nettles,

those tale-tellers of broken habitations.

 

Each sandstone block of the now redundant

two mile long sea wall was planned, ordered, paid for,

quarried, cut, carted, meticulously laid.

Now, in its foundations, scurvy grass grows.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SOME BRIGHT MORNING

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read705 views

You open the new, free app on your iPhone:

a digital, audio library

of bird song and bird calls worldwide

courtesy of Cornell University –

algorithms, satellites, Tech Bros,

the Groves of Academe and philanthropy

in accidental constellation.

 

***

 

The mix of salt marsh and salt meadow stretches –

reedy and golden and green with sporadic

silver blue lagoons – nearly to Wales

across this expansive estuary.

‘Heron!’ you whisper, ‘Red Shank! Meadow Pipit!’

A beat. ‘Whimbrel! Little Egret! Brent Goose!’

A pause. ‘Skylark!’. And I can hear the bird –

above the gentle soughing of the wind –

distantly but actually, somewhere

unseen to the north-north west, its song

ascending in bright air.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

OVER THE HILLS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read651 views

Vast banks, bluffs of clouds are moving steadily,

unerringly it seems, from the west – some

darkling with the makings of rain, others white

like the little egret that rises

from the sunlit reeds, and flies westwards, across

the wide estuary to Wales and a channel

of open water. Beyond is a range

of low hills, whose fields are bright with sunlight

or deep shadowed by chance clouds. Out of sight

are mountains, valleys, coastlines, a sea.

 

The little egret’s ancestors have travelled

aeons for just this imagined moment:

reflections passing in fleeting water –

a white bird, shaped, hulled, like a feathered

sailing clipper, and islands of cumulus.

 

 

 

 

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