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barley

POETRY

SICKLES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read223 views

Fleetingly across the lawn a swift’s shadow

falls. I look up. In the blue mid-summer

mid-morning is the moon, a hazy crescent.

Swifts race, with their brief whistles, over the house.

The already heavy air is cut

momentarily by their wings – and then

they are gone into the ancient azure.

 

Beneath the plum tree, among seeds scattered

from the bird feeders, are barley, wheat, rye.

They took root, and now are green and tall –

wild grasses tamed with stone sickles ten

thousand years ago. We will harvest them with

curve bladed secateurs.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE FALL OF SPARROWS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

Commensal with humans for 10,000 years,

since the first cultivation of barley

and wheat, the house sparrow, that communal

eater of insects and seeds, is ubiquitous –

from Kolkata to Coventry, Haifa

to Hawaii – sometimes a pest, a pet

or on a plate; a symbol of lechery

or vulgarity – but in decline here

because of pesticides perhaps

or mobile phones, car parks, unleaded petrol.

 

Certainly, we miss the small flocks in the shrubs

and their rapid, ceaseless chatterings.

A lone bird appears occasionally,

silent mostly but for the odd, ‘chirrup, chirrup’.

So, as Hamlet says, ‘…we defy augury.

There’s a special providence in the fall

of a sparrow… if it be not now,

yet it will come – the readiness is all.’

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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