Welcome to David Selzer
David Selzer is a writer of poetry, prose fiction, screenplays and stage plays. He embraces digital platforms to share his work of more than fifty years… READ MORE
Latest Post / Update
-
WITNESS THIS ARMY
During the interval, after act three
of Glinka’s opera, ‘Ivan Susannin’ –
pre-revolution, ‘A Life for the Tzar’ –
Stalin would leave his box at the Bolshoi.
In the fourth act, Ivan, the peasant, lures
the Polish Army out of Smolensk
and into a profound, winter forest.
They are lost. In the last act, they kill him.
Deep in the Katyn woods near Smolensk, pines
darkened the clearing where thousands, thousands
of Polish officers turned to earth.
So many crimes unpunished, dead unnamed.
‘O, Polnische Kamerad, wo sind
der Juden?’ ‘Majdanek, Chelmno, Oswiecim.’
An epoch has the tyrants it preserves,
even for an eggshell.
Note: The poem was first published on the site in January 2010
3 responses to “WITNESS THIS ARMY”
-
I like the little bits of German in the poems this month, a helpful corrective to our current isolationism. I’d always found the multilingual bits of, say, Eliot, or Pound, a bit irritating, as if they were showing off. You make me wonder if I just didn’t get the contemporary references.
-
That great leveller the internet makes ‘bits of German’ etc. accessible to all – and, in the case of quotations the source as well as the sense.
-
-
The idea that Stalin stepped from his theatre box into the Katyn woods with his revolver [or maybe Tokarev Automatic – you are right about the internet!] is perfectly chilling and appropriate.
-
Search by Tag
9/11 A.E. Housman America Anglesey anti-semitism Aristotle Atlantic Atlantic Slave Trade Auschwitz Beaumaris British Cape Town cathedral Celts charity Cheshire Chester childhood Churchill Civil War comrades cormorant death Dee dee estuary Dublin England English Europe Ezra Pound Fossils fox French Gaza gazebo German gibbet God Great War gulls heart Hegel Hitler Iraq Ireland Irish sea irony. Israel Jerusalem Jews landscape Liverpool Liverpool Bay Llandudno London love Manhattan May Menai Straits Mersey miracle Missouri Moscow Napoleon North Wales Ovid paradise Paris Plato pre-pubescent Putin racist river river Dee robin roma Romans Rome Russia skull South Africa Soweto Stalin swifts Syria T.S. Eliot teacher Telford USA Venice Victorian Vienna W.B. Yeats Wales Wellington Welsh Western Front winter Wirral Ynys Mon
Leave a Reply