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Chester

POETRY

ENGLISH JOURNEY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

I have made my English journey – by rail,

Chester to Euston return – maybe,

on average, three times a year since I was four.

 

It is like revisiting a ragged

museum of serendipitous

keepsakes: Canada Geese on Cheshire ponds;

GEC become Alstom in Stafford:

wind turbines and mobile phone towers

jostling radio masts near Rugby;

concrete cows in Milton Keynes; Ovaltine

in Kings Langley; Watford’s mosques;

and, anywhere, marshalling yards of

derelict rolling stock, broken factories,

gaudy retail parks, cramped estates, distant

mansions, acres of subsidised rape

and denatured fields of maize stubble –

no north/south divide, just comfort or neglect.

 

I think of London as we begin to slow.

The city of power not poverty –

its lure, its promise; Larkin’s ‘postal districts

packed like squares of wheat’; Cobbett’s ‘Great Wen’;

the nation’s sinkhole – and its flywheel

driving riches, driving penury,

as if everywhere else were its hinterland.

 

The rails, for the most part, follow the canals –

Grand Union, Oxford, Trent & Mersey,

Shropshire Union. They follow the land’s

contours – and bring me home to a place

that is not far from the edge of England,

where I am minutes from a sight of mountains.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE RED SHOES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.8K views

Ten minutes or so into a performance

of Mathew Bourne’s ballet at Sadler’s Wells,

with the principal alone spot lit en pointe,

there was a muffled shout off stage right

and a clatter as if a metal ladder

had been toppled. (Professional dance –

that always seems heartbreakingly effortless –

is always on the cusp of injury).

The music stopped suddenly, the curtains closed

– and, as the house lights came on, we were asked

to remain seated, assured the show would start

again soon. Voices rose like flocks of sparrows.

Mobiles were turned back on. Texts and selfies sent…

 

Many decades before there were cell phones

you had a pair of red high heel shoes,

of which you were especially fond

having the spirit of a dancer.

We had been to a rather dull party

in Liverpool 8, and, changing trains

at Hooton – from electric to steam,

as if in some cut-price sci-fi movie –

you stumbled and one of your shoes fell

between the carriage and the platform.

You limped from Chester General on my arm,

to a taxi, like an elegant, injured bird.

I returned to Hooton the next day.

A porter had seen and retrieved the shoe –

scuffed, and besmirched all over with soot.

You said, ‘Some glass slipper!’. ‘Some prince!’ I said…

 

The ballet recommenced. We watched the girl’s

destiny unfold like a Greek tragedy –

her hubris vanity, men, the joy of dance? –

and end, like Anna Karenina,

in front of a steam train.

 

 

 

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POETRY

AT CHESTER CROSS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.4K views

I am standing near the loud evangelists

by the medieval sandstone cross that marks

the centre of this erstwhile Roman camp,

Castra Deva, base for two centuries

of the Twentieth, Valeria Victrix –

streets south and west to the Dee, east to forests

and the lush plain, north to sandstone outcrops.

 

The Presbyterian rhetoric

of Damnation and Sweet Jesus keeps

other spectators away, gives me

a clear view of the midsummer,

pagan parade – ‘I am the good shepherd:

the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep’ –

with its Hell’s Mouth on wheels, its samba band –

‘…he that is an hireling…whose own

the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming’ –

with its Romans, Vikings, giants, a dragon –

‘and fleeth: and the wolf scattereth the sheep’ –

with its Saint Werburgh, the city’s patron saint

(famed for resurrecting a goose)

and my three geese in white gowns following –

wife, daughter, granddaughter – but no sheep.

 

I move to a spec on one of the Rows,

unique first floor arcades, their origin

unknown but much admired by the Kaiser.

When I was at school in the city,

we would come to these Rows for a smoke,

our striped caps folded in our pockets.

Below was a tobacconist who sold

Cuban cigarettes in packets of 5.

How I would dream of the wide avenues

of a metropolis – of fame, romance

in its concert halls and libraries!

Directly opposite where I am waiting,

behind a Greek revival portico,

is a private club, its Masonic curtains

drawn. Here was the camp’s principia –

headquarters of the legion and the province.

If the Empire had continued to expand

not consolidate before collapsing –

despite Rome’s alarming geese! – Deva

would have been Britannia’s capital.

 

The procession passes beneath me

in triumph – led by two street theatre

professionals, a husband and wife,

consummately engaging the crowds.

The evangelists are hectoring still,

threatening distantly, out of sight.

My geese are smiling still, cavorting,

even the littlest – earnest, seemingly

untiring – and my lucky heart fills with love.

All three are holding up their goosey standards

made by an artist – painted, sculpted

papier maché glued to frames of withies,

those lithe willow branches, slender, sturdy,

infinitely flexible, which have been used,

since antiquity, to keep safe ewes and lambs.

 

 

 

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POETRY

FOLLOWING THE CHAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.9K views

The photograph could have been taken anywhere

they forged the Royal Navy’s anchor chains –

Dudley, Newcastle, Ponypridd or here

in Saltney, Chester, reclaimed marshland

near the river. Wherever the Sea Lords chose

to give the contract the chain makers

and their families moved – like funfair folk

or circus people – if they were able.

 

There are thirteen men in the picture – a shift

about to go on judging by the spotless

faces, arms and hands. They are not burly men

though their biceps were developed hauling,

rolling, beating, linking the molten iron.

There is no fat on them – despite the buckets

of draught beer the employer provided

to hydrate them in the purging foundry.

 

They are pale, working in the dark except

for the furnace glare. They have been posed –

by some Edwardian photographer

keen to record the locality –

in their full length leather aprons, some with caps,

some bare headed, three with mufflers to wipe

the sweat from their eyes, four with waistcoats.

They are sons of blacksmiths, grandsons, village lads,

from the coast, from the hills, from the valleys.

 

The ones in front are on one knee, with sledge hammers

and tongs, a length of chain at their feet. Unused

to cameras, some look at the lens – like two

kneeling – or away like the one at the back

with his tash and his thumbs in his waistcoat.

He was Simeon Harris – my wife’s grandad.

 

After the Great War the contract moved. He stayed –

married by then to his best friend’s widow,

responsible for two sets of children –

and never worked again, living on the dole,

the rare rabbit snared on the Duke’s estates,

the very occasional shared salmon

lifted without licence from the river,

his wife’s pittance for cleaning the chapel,

soup from the workhouse for breaking stones.

 

The day before he died – his wife scolding him

for idling – he sat, on the back step,

smoking a roll-up, his muffler hiding

the cancerous lump on his neck. My wife,

then nine years old, sat close. He whispered to her,

‘I feel bad today, love’.

 

 

Note: first published 2016.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE HEREDITARY PRINCIPLE

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read1.9K views

Hugh d’Avranches, one of the Conqueror’s henchmen,

with him at Hastings, got the Saxon earldom

of Chester and the palatine of Cheshire,

with its forests of deer and boar, as reward.

His nicknames were ‘Lupus’ and ‘Gros Veneur’

because he ravened the Welsh like a wolf

and he was a hunter and a glutton.

 

His descendant, Gerald Grosvenor, His Grace,

the late, sad 6th Duke of Westminster – holder

of twenty eight appointments, decorations,

medals, orders and titles, many bestowed

by the Queen; landlord of much of London’s

Belgravia and Mayfair, where dwell

Arab despots, Russian oligarchs

and celebrities from showbiz and fashion;

his motto being ‘Virtus Non Stemma’,

‘Virtue Not Pedigree’ – had riches

greater than the combined wealth of six

million of his poorest, fellow subjects.

And we are all, everyone of us, subjects

of Her Majesty. What a great leveller

our constitutional monarchy is!

 

 

 

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POETRY

A PUBLIC MAN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

i.m. David Robinson

 

At the celebration of his life –

in an erstwhile garrison church now

educational centre – there was music,

applause, laughter, sadness, his cardboard coffin

with red roses and his panama hat.

And it was as if he were there – as he was,

for sure, in the gathered memories

of the many present and the many,

in absentia, who had written.

The order of service commanded

‘All Sing The Red Flag’, and printed the words –

and most did, not just the comrades like us

who savoured and relished his serious joke.

 

Gathered outside in the soft May light,

greeting friends and colleagues then watching

as the cortège took its gradual leave, we

found ourselves applauding in that public place.

 

There are some you cannot believe are dead.

You would be unsurprised if they turned up

one day and continued a conversation

they had begun a week before, a decade.

So as I walk the Millennium Greenway –

part of the old Cheshire Lines railway

recycled (pun intended) – I can imagine

his cycling towards me, stopping, listening,

laughing richly at ironies then tell me,

with charm and gravitas, what I need to know.

 

 

 

Note: The poem was originally published in May 2015.

 

 

 

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