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POETRY

A HOG IN ARMOUR, A PIG IN LIPSTICK…

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2.1K views

The day after Thatcher was turned to ashes,

I crossed the channel by easyJet, noted

the busy shipping lanes, then saw England’s coast –

Dungeness and Romney Marsh, Dover’s cliffs –

and the North Downs towards Canterbury

becoming obscured by rain as we banked

for Gatwick. Once home, I caught up on the news.

 

She was fêted in Chelsea, reviled

in Barnsley. Her official biography

was due to be broadcast as the BBC’s

Book at Bedtime. And her policies,

as always, dividing and divisive.

 

At the High Table, New College, Oxford,

dining with Dawkins and his acolytes,

the Iron Lady with lips of Monroe

and the Emperor Caligula’s eyes –

an erstwhile chemist who once worked for

J. Lyons & Co on ice cream preservatives –

misunderstood the talk of the selfish gene,

the immortal gene, and thought she had learned

there is no such thing as society –

her version of Caligula’s horse –

from her intellectual, though, of course, not

her socially aspirational betters.

 

So undigested science was used

to justify greed and social mayhem.

How could a democracy be traduced

by an obsessed, bitter causer of havoc,

determined to redeem feudalism?

Her methods were Hitler’s – challenge the foe

with extremism and await concessions.

 

I remember the young sleeping in doorways,

students sharing textbooks, roads unmended,

civic dereliction; the overthrowing

of unelected union barons

for unaccountable press barons;

and always the scoundrel’s final refuge

Little England’s patriotism.

Her history will be written as

both tragedy and farce.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE STREET PARTY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.8K 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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