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children

HELTER-SKELTER

The bends are tight and frequent down the pass.
I can only glimpse the autumn colours
in the vertiginous valleys below.
There are reds and golds, you tell me, even
lime yellows – still deep and rich though mist falls.

Before the narrow track to the quarry
there is a lay-by. A father parked there
and murdered his children to spite his wife…
From somewhere out of sight multi-coloured
birthday balloons rise into the still air.

Though the way is well marked, the lessening
of the gradient relieves. Before the last
ice age this was ocean and may be so
again – but the murder of children
is irredeemable.

 

 

 

WISHES

For Evelyn b. 13 1.10

 

Born to good music by strong women,

Ella’s ‘isle of joy’, Nina’s ’it’s a new dawn’ –

how you nestle in your parents’ untrammelled

love, how you suck with unrelenting hunger!

 

Born into a world of rubble, with children

buried alive, a world of chicanery

and hatreds – you have entered a difficult

place, little Evie, somewhere remarkable,

full of tears and amazing kindnesses!

 

Born into a world of snow, a fox’s

nocturnal tracks in the white garden

of the tall, Victorian villa, a Blackcap

at the bird feeder, a Redwing sheltering

in the laurel and, away on the Downs,

boys and girls, freed from school, tobogganing

over the fossils and flints on the steep shore

of a palaeolithic sea – how you squirm

with hunger, how you bask in so much love!

 

Three wishes then for you, little bird:

may you be lucky, may you be gracious,

may you always have someone to love!

 

CROSSING THE PENNINES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read323 views

When I drive over the moors

in the hugger-mugger traffic,

I think of the children

murdered, hidden.

 

When I see the southern sweep

of the Saddleworth Road

over the fern and the peat,

I think of them.

 

It is almost a prayer.

And I wonder if my chance,

fellow travellers think the same.

Remembrance is solitary, transitory.

 

A NEIGHBOURHOOD OF STRANGERS

Buzzards splayed their wingtips against the sun.

A Phantom entered the glacial valley,

its fuselage burning – the pilot

and crewman still at the controls, their choice made.

In school, it was story time – magical

oak woods, changelings secreted. The children

heard a rushing like oceans. Their teacher

saw the fire approach and two young men,

with a hundred years of technology,

burst upon the huddled village’s

common land… Children dreamt of foreign men

gone to dust in a golden fire for a

neighbourhood of strangers.