Tag Archives

Carthage

POETRY

A SOUVENIR

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read246 views

On one of Mazzaro’s gritty beaches

a cable car below Taormina,

I found a piece of Etna’s lava

the size of a goujon, a sinker,

a bobbin, smoothed only a little

by modest Mediterranean tides;

fetching five euros in the tourist shops but

unseen by the landlords of expensive

loungers and umbrellas, by Russian tourists,

Thai masseuses, Indian peddlers. No doubt

geologists could date it exactly

but I prefer the inexactitudes

of possibilities. Perhaps it was spewed

when the city walls of Catania

diverted the flow into the harbour

or when the Carthaginians were thwarted

from capturing Syracuse, or when Aeneas,

in his wanderings, approached Sicily.

 

Dark grey pumice, heavy, pockmarked like

moon craters, still smelling distantly

of the sea, it rests on a mantelpiece

next to a bit of driftwood slight as balsam,

shaped like a small fish, found on Deganwy beach

by Afon Conwy – stolen goods, contraband,

freighted with histories.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

LONGING AND DUTY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K 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.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

MOUNTAIN VIEW

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.5K views

Some time after midnight, when the bars have closed,

the hoots and laughter of revellers

on the stone-clad stairs wakes us. Much later

wind, billowing through the open corridors

of the steel framed building, shakes our door

intermittently like some errant soul.

In the shallow valley below the hotel

a cock crows above the gusts and the rattles.

 

***

 

In the morning a warm west wind blows

over the sea from what was Carthage.

The valley slopes gradually to a cove.

Before tourism this was wilderness –

only the tideless waves on the gritty beach.

Now there are a score or so of sun loungers,

two tavernas, two supermarkets and a bar –

and some smallholdings amongst the scrub.

 

***

 

On the other side of the valley are

two more resort hotels like this, open

from May to October. At night, they are lit

like cruise ships. Beyond is Mount Vasiliko –

wind turbines on its slopes and, at its summit,

a monitoring post. Mare Nostrum

is everybody’s – a dozen or more navies,

and thousands of desperate optimists.

 

***

 

From the terrace by the pool, we can see,

through mountainous clefts, Mount Ida’s peak.

At the summit is Timios Stavros,

the Holy Cross chapel. In a cave

on its slopes, Zeus was born. Swifts call above us –

ecumenical, celestial, their flight

calligraphic. Crete is shaped like a

scabbardfish, feinting between Europe

and Africa. I think of the empty,

wintry rooms – the patience of islanders

used to long absences.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments