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Ancient Rome

POETRY

AT THE BRIDGE

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read835 views

When I was poorly my mother read to me

from Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’:

Then out spoke brave Horatius, the Captain

of the Gate: “To every man upon

this earth, death cometh soon or late; And how

can man die better than facing fearful odds…”

He lived, was gifted land, and made in bronze.

 

But what I remember from those sickly days

is an image of the Captain, sword drawn,

and his two comrades. Behind them,

a second line of defence, they had fired

the only bridge across the Tiber.

Their duty was to stay the baying hordes

charging down the hillside towards them.

I see them now, three figures in a fiery

valley filled with flickering shadows,

waiting for the enemy.

 

 

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POETRY

LONGING AND DUTY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read717 views

We visited the Vatican the first week

of January so there was only

a short queue for the Sistine Chapel,

and few visitors, once inside, to distract

from possibly Rome’s most famous work of art;

its gaudy magnificence; its lavish

genius; its conspicuous wealth; its

indulgent humanness; its celebration

of beauty, of flesh, and immortality.

 

Michelangelo, painter, architect,

sculptor and poet, spent months on his back

creating The Last Judgement on the ceiling –

a graphic history of prophesy.

One of the polymath’s sonnets ends:

‘…love makes perfect our friends here on earth

but death makes them more so in heaven’.

 

We left the Vatican via the Library

with its seventy thousand volumes.

There was an exhibition of illustrated

manuscript versions of Virgil’s works –

possibly the city’s most famous poet –

each much more than a millennium old,

fragments saved during the papacy’s

many epochs of acquisitiveness.

 

One illustration depicts Dido,

Queen of Carthage, on her funeral pyre.

She had been jilted by Aeneas, who left

to do his god-given duty to found Rome.

She killed herself with her ex-lover’s sword.

The poet has Aeneas – who had carried,

on his back,  his own aged father from Troy’s

burning ruins – watch the funeral pyre’s

receding flames as he sailed, almost due north,

across what would become Mare Nostrum.

 

 

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POETRY

SAINT COLUMBA AND THE CURLEWS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read914 views

If I were obliged to chose a patron saint

it might be Columba – his Irish name

Colmkill, Dove of the Churchyard. He was

a poet, a scholar, a missionary

to the Western Isles, and all of Scotia.

 

So what had drawn him to Christianity

on the far Celtic edge of Europe?

One god? Redemption? Or the hieratic

Latin manuscripts he had learned to read –

long after the empire of Ancient Rome

had imploded west of Byzantium?

 

He had studied, I am sure, the sunlit groves

of the Hesperides, and would dream, when days

lengthened into gentler nights, and warmer,

summer winds blew from the distant south,

of bird-thronged orchards lush with golden apples –

but always heard the curlews calling

along the dark and glittering shore.

 

 

 

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POETRY

APOCALYPSE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read386 views

Via Del Corso, Rome, March 2020.

The boutiques had been closed by decree, even

Calvin Klein Underwear and Brooks Brothers.

The only pedestrians were the Pope,

in his white robes, and his bodyguard,

in bulging suits – on a pilgrimage

to the ancient church of San Marcello

set back from the street. Beneath a crucifix,

used to assuage a 15th century plague,

Pope Francis prayed to God to stop the virus.

 

The street, in Roman times, was Via Lata –

Broad Way – and ran through the Field of Mars

towards the Adriatic. At Mardi Gras,

in the Renaissance, the Ghetto was emptied

and the Jews paraded along the street

so that the Christians could mock and scorn.

 

Italy’s churches had been closed by decree –

except in the north where some were being used

as temporary morgues, from which corpses

were taken, for cremation, day and night,

by slow convoys of army lorries.

 

Like riderless horses around a race track,

history repeats and repeats, and God,

who was thought to be dead, may merely be deaf.

 

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POETRY

THE SECOND TIME AS FARCE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read526 views

So many colonisers here in this

terra amara, this bitter land –

from Ancient Greece to Bourbon Spain,

from Ancient Rome to Scandinavia,

from the Caliphate to Swabia – fitting

therefore that our cable car cabin

should be muti-lingual, each of us

keeping our space, averting our eyes.

 

As we descend from Via Luigi

Pirandello to Isola Bella,

past terraces with sun loungers, over

the Campo Sportivo and the tangled

scrub in the gorge, we hear suddenly

from the air itself it seems, from nowhere,

the first bars of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ –

those fateful sisters who will choose the half,

in battle, that shall be killed, the half that live.

 

There is a confident flurry of amused

Nordic voices: ‘Er vi i himmelen?’

(Are we in heaven?) ‘Eller helvede?’

(Or hell?) You whisper, ‘The Vikings are back!’

 

 

 

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