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POETRY

THE FOURTH ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR

By David SelzerSeptember 30, 20214 Comments2 min read1.9K views

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’,

observed Holmes to the astounded Watson,

having noted that the doctor’s face spoke

‘of hardship and sickness’. He had seen action

in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which,

like the First was all about The Great Game

and Russia, and both, like the Third, all

about the British Raj, that Jewel in the Crown,

and Afghan monarchs that might be cajoled

with sufficient treasure or sufficient blood,

while the true rulers, the tribal elders

of the ethnic groups, parleyed with all sides.

The Great Game continues, and with new players:

America, China, Iran, Pakistan,

Saudi Arabia. Are Taliban –

who, as some predicted never went away,

but fought a twenty year insurgency –

aka Mujahideen aka

‘freedom fighters’ (to quote Margaret Thatcher),

and the well-funded, so-called Islamic State –

that movable terror, that mobile nihilism –

pawns in the new game,

useful idiots in the exploitation

of the country’s many mineral fields?

Those who brought Enduring Freedom chose

not to eradicate polio

but supplied electricity throughout

enabling scenes of havoc and mayhem

to be broadcast on WhatsApp and Instagram.

So, record the lies about Afghanistan –

hypocritical, self-serving untruths,

which ignore the torture at Bagram Air Base,

which prioritise the lives of dogs. Record

that the liars are mostly privileged,

sanctimonious, nostalgic, white

imperialists, some moonlighting as hacks.

The Fourth war has masqueraded under

two different euphemisms,

Operation Herrick and then Toral,

and been fought with allies – with Nato,

and the erstwhile Afghan Army and Police –

and achieved no discernible victories,

no battle honours only body bags,

only more of the maimed and the desperate,

only incompetence and abandonment –

against lightly-armed zealots on Chinese-made

Honda motor bikes with a seemingly

endless supply of imported fuel

financed by hectares of exported drugs,

and for whom aspects of criminality,

particularly towards women and girls,

appear a brutal and sacred duty,

in a poor country corrupted with money,

a Ponzi scheme for foreign consultants.

Although its capital city, Kabul,

remains the only one in the world

without a railway station, the trade

in opium and hashish has blossomed,

Afghanistan becoming the world leader –

which might have rendered even Holmes speechless.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

THE BANDED DEMOISELLE

By David SelzerAugust 27, 20202 Comments2 min read1.6K views

If Ezekiel’s watchman, or, rather, God’s

had been on the job there would have been

some sort of heads-up – a cornet perhaps

if not a fanfare – that the Parish Church clock,

put in place in 1867,

would be chiming again, hours and quarters,

this summer morning. But it just happens –

almost surreptitiously, like some

member of the chorus in an opera

sneaking on late from the wings. And late it is

by a few minutes – as before it was fast.

Such churlishness, some would say, is tantamount

to treason – as the Prime Minister

of one of the earth’s richest countries,

though singlehandedly it seems fighting off

phalanxes of invisible foes, finds time

to fly to the Orkneys for a photo-op

with a couple of large crabs on the deck

of a trawler in Kirkwall harbour,

and speak with officer-class passion about

the abstract benefits of the Union –

the English monarchy’s first colonies –

whose strength has helped us through…and will again…

As Benjamin Franklin – who chased lightning,

with an iron rod, on a horse – once said, “Tricks

and Treachery are the practice of fools,

that do not have brains enough to be honest”.

And I recall that the name of the church –

built in local sandstone for a burgeoning,

provincial bourgeoisie – is All Saints,

so no bases or bets left uncovered there.

Nevertheless, when I hear the chimes

and watch my live-in gardener – whom

I have loved for nearly sixty years –

building a rockery in assorted stone

with alpines and lavender, there is some sense

of re-setting if not re-winding the clock.

Suddenly, out of the purple buddleia –

an import from China, nationalists

should note, that self-seeds particularly well

in ravaged, industrial wastelands –

a dragonfly appears, metallic green,

with fluttering wings, translucent, pale,

and disappears somewhere beyond the hosta

and the agapanthus. I learn, instantly,

it was a female banded demoiselle,

its habitat slow-moving muddy streams.

Beneath the garden and the house – a fort

against the dark – was a pond and a brook

speculative builders filled with rubble

more than two decades before the church was built.

That fragile creature of breath-taking beauty,

like a prophetess, divined the lost waters.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

FROM THE RUINS

By David SelzerMarch 26, 20161 Comment1 min read1.4K views

You are old enough now to remember this.

The overhead power line at the cottage

meant we could not fly the new kite there.

I knew a field five minutes away

with a ruined medieval chapel

and a view down the slope to a bay

where hundreds of souls drowned in a fabled storm.

But we told you of the space and the wind.

Your daddy showed you how to fly the kite

while your mummy, grandma and me went

to church! Vestiges of paint remained

though the weathers of centuries had scrubbed

the internal walls of most of the murals.

Through the arches of the chancel window,

we saw you flying your kite: serious,

already skilled by a good teacher.

You managed the controls, intuitively

aware of aero dynamics, like

some latter-day Daedalus, as the kite,

mass produced sky blue plastic from China,

bucked and soared in the prevailing westerly.

Rightly oblivious of history,

you were a five year old Benjamin Franklin

looking to steal heaven’s thunder and lightning.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

THE JOSEPHLESS NATIVITY

By David SelzerDecember 22, 20152 Comments1 min read1.5K views

When, having walked up from Central Station,
we reach Hope Street – that long sentence stopped
both ends with cathedrals – she protests, ‘My legs are tired!’
but, with the promise of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’,
we make it to the Unity Theatre,
the old Hope Place synagogue. She knows
the story well but watches keenly as the imp,
out smarted, stamps his foot through the earth’s crust.

Very properly reared by atheists –
free of chapel, mosque, shrine, shul and temple –
she encounters the Christmas story
at school. She speaks, knowingly, about ‘The Star’,
‘Mary’, ‘Baby Jesus’. So, though infidels,
we buy a set of nativity figures –
wooden, the size of netsuke, made
in China. Too late, we notice there is
no Joseph – or, rather, like any jobbing
repertory actor some guy is doubling
as carpenter (aka accidental
saint) and one of the shepherds, hence the halo
and the crook. She sets them out as in the play –
in which she was one of many narrators –
mother and crib at the centre, the rest
in a semi-circle facing them.

The world is full of stories, although not all
earth shattering. Some abound in common nouns.
These two are pseudonymous. She remembers
both of them equally well – the baby,
the straw spun into gold.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY