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POETRY

THE FOURTH ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read652 views

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’,

observed Holmes to the astounded Watson,

having noted that the doctor’s face spoke

‘of hardship and sickness’. He had seen action

in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which,

like the First was all about The Great Game

and Russia, and both, like the Third, all

about the British Raj, that Jewel in the Crown,

and Afghan monarchs that might be cajoled

with sufficient treasure or sufficient blood,

while the true rulers, the tribal elders

of the ethnic groups, parleyed with all sides.

 

The Great Game continues, and with new players:

America, China, Iran, Pakistan,

Saudi Arabia. Are Taliban –

who, as some predicted never went away,

but fought a twenty year insurgency –

aka Mujahideen aka

‘freedom fighters’ (to quote Margaret Thatcher),

and the well-funded, so-called Islamic State –

that movable terror, that mobile nihilism –

pawns in the new game,

useful idiots in the exploitation

of the country’s many mineral fields?

 

Those who brought Enduring Freedom chose

not to eradicate polio

but supplied electricity throughout

enabling scenes of havoc and mayhem

to be broadcast on WhatsApp and Instagram.

So, record the lies about Afghanistan –

hypocritical, self-serving untruths,

which ignore the torture at Bagram Air Base,

which prioritise the lives of dogs. Record

that the liars are mostly privileged,

sanctimonious, nostalgic, white

imperialists, some moonlighting as hacks.

 

The Fourth war has masqueraded under

two different euphemisms,

Operation Herrick and then Toral,

and been fought with allies – with Nato,

and the erstwhile Afghan Army and Police –

and achieved no discernible victories,

no battle honours only body bags,

only more of the maimed and the desperate,

only incompetence and abandonment –

against lightly-armed zealots on Chinese-made

Honda motor bikes with a seemingly

endless supply of imported fuel

financed by hectares of exported drugs,

and for whom aspects of criminality,

particularly towards women and girls,

appear a brutal and sacred duty,

in a poor country corrupted with money,

a Ponzi scheme for foreign consultants.

 

Although its capital city, Kabul,

remains the only one in the world

without a railway station, the trade

in opium and hashish has blossomed,

Afghanistan becoming the world leader –

which might have rendered even Holmes speechless.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CELEBRITY

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments2 min read655 views

Bought for the Coronation,  our first TV

had a nine inch screen. It stood in a corner

of the front room. My grandmother, who

had outlived two husbands, two World Wars,

and once had tea with Buffalo Bill,

thought that those appearing on ‘the box’

could see those watching, so was discerning

about whom she chose to watch, and when.

 

She particularly liked ‘What’s My Line?’, an import

from America, in which a panel

of four TV ‘personalities’ guessed

what a range of guests did for a living.

It was broadcast early Sunday evenings.

An hour before she would heat her curling tongs

in the small range in the kitchen. The house

would fill suddenly with the smell of singed hair.

 

Her favourite panellist – she thought him ‘refined’ –

was Gilbert Harding: a choleric,

Cambridge graduate; a poorhouse orphan,

prematurely middle aged; a good

BBC voice with the proper vowels,

a hint of tobacco. The Corporation

kept his secret, when ‘the love that dare not

speaks its name’ risked penal servitude.

 

Outed by the tabloids ‘as the rudest man

in Britain’, he was recognised in the street.

He described himself as a ‘tele-phoney’,

and recounted a journey on the Tube

from Russell Square to Oxford Circus

when he was pointed out, and fêted,

while, at the other end of the carriage,

T.S. Eliot was ignored. Old Possum,

another smoker, feared ‘the television

habit’, thought the word itself ‘ugly

because of foreignness or ill-breeding’.

Eliot, a confused anti-Semite,

and Groucho Marx were mutual fans.

As the latter might have said to the former

on the one occasion they ate together,

‘Tom, just because you’re a genius,’

flicking cigar ash, raising an eyebrow,

‘doesn’t mean you’re not also a schmendrick!’.

Harding lived for many years in Brighton,

whose bus company named a bus after him –

i.e. ‘bus’ as in short for ‘omnibus’.

 

My grandmother filled part of my childhood

with tales of her girlhood in Liverpool

from some sixty years before: the bloody

sectarian skirmishes; the frequent

prophecies of the end of days; the hulks

beached and rusting on the Cast Iron Shore

at the bottom of her steep street; and the boy

next door gone to America, and lost.

I can still recall his name six decades on –

and many decades since he sailed to Boston –

Johnny Flaws, Johnny Flaws.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

O BRAVE NEW WORLD!

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read425 views

On the third floor of Ca’ Rezzonico –

where gondoliers slept when the palazzo

was let to the song writer Cole Porter –

is Egidio Martini’s collection

of five centuries of Venetian art.

Three of the floors’ small windows survive,

each an intentional belvedere.

Two view the Grand Canal, the third south west.

The eye follows the perspective below:

a canal and its quay with inevitable

eclectic craft, stone bridges and turisti;

then tenements and the terracotta tiles –

but not the anticipated skyline,

on the mainland, of the Euganean Hills,

distant and pale as if the background to

a nativity or crucifixion

instead seven, multi-storey cruise liners.

 

On the floor below are the city’s masters:

Canal, Guardi, Longhi, and Tiepolo

whose son’s fresco, Il Mundo Novo, depicts

the backs of a late eighteenth century

Venetian crowd of all clans and classes

queuing to see a huckster’s peep show

of America – the crassness

of the machine observed in profile

only by the artist and his late father.

When the son died La Serenissima

had ended. Bonaparte had arrived.

 

From the ballroom below there is music.

‘You’re the tops…You’re Napoleon Brandy…

You’re a painting by Botticelli…

You’re the smile on the Mona Lisa…the moon

over Mae West’s shoulder.’

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE SILVER SCREEN

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read532 views

‘Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.’

THE EMPEROR OF ICE CREAM, Wallace Stevens

 

I try to imagine your childhood as if

it were mine – not just the steep terraced street

called ‘Coronation’ and the ice cream

factory round the corner at the bottom

but the cinema twenty feet away

showing double features every night

except Sunday and Saturday matinées

with The Three Stooges and Roy Rogers.

 

Ours minds were full of an America

that shimmered, that was large and echoed loudly

in the street – of love, anger, laughter, justice.

Our ears were filled with the roar of aircraft

from the local base. Behind the hall –

in the unlit entry where projectionists

took a smoke and couples courted after shows –

someone daubed in black paint, ‘Yanks Go Home!’,

and it is still there almost pristine! ‘Ars

longa, vita brevis,’ as some Roman wrote.

 

You shoot from the hips like Jane Russell,

utter coruscating one-liners

like Hepburn, whisper sweet everythings

like Veronica Lake. What sort of man

would I be now if I had slept only

yards from such magic! Perhaps a maker

of ice cream,  an emperor of seeming?

 

 

 

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POETRY

CONFEDERATE CEMETERY, ALTON, ILLINOIS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read413 views

All of the names of the dead are Celtic

or English. Most of them died – in the prison

near the river –  from typhoid rather than wounds.

Nobody set out to be cruel – farmers’

sons killing farmers’ sons. Their graveyard

above the bluffs was grassed, an obelisk built,

their names cast in bronze, bolted to limestone.

From the highway, there is no signage.

Eagles winter on the  bluffs. America’s heart

is green and fecund: a confluence –

Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE STREET PARTY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read397 views

Above every Mairie flaps the Tricolour.

On every lawn, in every yard through the gut

of America – where the Great Plains began

before the farmers came with wheat and pigs

and soya fields – Old Glory flutters.

Above the reception desk in every

riad in Morocco the king’s photo hangs.

Here, things are never that unambiguous.

 

In a street near the foot of the Downs,

too steep for tables, they have strung bunting

from house to house, moved cars, hired a leaning

bouncy castle and shared barbecues.

 

This chalk, grassland common – that slopes upwards

to the flint ridge with its Pilgrim’s Way,

from Winchester to Canterbury,

for a Norman priest killed by Norman lords –

is a (mostly) English floral lexicon:

Meadow Cranesbane, Meadow Vetchling, Yellow-rattle,

Dove’s Foot Cranesbill,  Common Spotted Orchid.

 

A Skylark ascends from the unmown grasses.

I think of Vaughan Williams’ orchestral piece,

with its shimmering solo violin,

the George Meredith poem which inspired it –

‘He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake’ –

Celts evoking the essence of what was theirs.

 

The party dwindles as the drizzle arrives.

To be English is to be contrarian –

not being Irish, Scots, Welsh or ‘foreign’.

At the top of the street, a patriot with

a large, St George’s Cross drooping above

the privet hedge, has lit a bonfire

in a garden incinerator.  The rain,

now heavy, drums on the lid and, though sodden –

being dressed in England football strip –

he forces wet, tabloid newspapers down

the narrow funnel. Acrid smoke wafts up.

 

 

 

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