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POETRY

LAKE URMIA

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read603 views

In Old Persian, language of the Shah of Shahs,

Darius the Great, whose inscriptions

extend from Persepolis to Egypt,

and from Romania to Bahrain,

this salt lake, greater than the Dead Sea,

was called Chichast, ‘Glittering’ – sunlight

on the undulating lapidary

of myriads of silver particles.

Urmia – Assyrian Aramaic

for ‘City of Water’ – is high above

the lake on a fertile plateau

of orchards, grape vines, tobacco fields.

The city, a millennium ago,

was diverse, cosmopolitan, tolerant:

Christians, Jews, Muslims; Azeris,

Armenians, Assyrians, Persians, Kurds.

The Christians went first – massacred by the Turks

crossing the border. The Jews left for Israel.


Global warming is turning the lake

into an industrial salt pan the ancients

would have envied. Encrusted pedalos

and stranded diving boards in silent

holiday resort towns around the coast

glare like gargantuan rhinestones.

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POETRY

ON BENLLECH BEACH 2020

David Selzer By David Selzer8 Comments1 min read814 views

We have moved once to accommodate the tide

on this August strand, crowded with many

who otherwise would have been in the Algarve

or on some island in the Aegean.

At least the sands are free this year of the Christians

whose jocular misanthropy of games

of tug o’ war takes up so much space.

 

High tide is still nine minutes away,

and the beach here rises just perceptibly –

but ramparts have gone, and a castle keep.

Someone has placed a child’s spade in the sand

guessing where the flow will end, the ebb begin –

or knowing it will be so, for the sea turns

just as it laps against the blue blade.

 

We are so pleased watching the waves recede,

as if we had outwitted them, outlived them

almost, we do not notice the spade has gone,

its modest owner emulating Canute.

On the horizon, anchored until high tide,

container ships and tankers are moving now

safe to cross the Bar, and sail into the Mersey.

 

Curious to face the sea as if facing

the future. Though the waters surge and swell

with many metaphors, for the most part

only the inevitable happens –

like the wave, the invisible tsunami,

that will strike these islands’ shores this coming

New Year’s Day. Something the hateful, the greedy,

and the ignorant have willed – for a chimera,

a mere abstraction.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CONTAGION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read655 views

‘O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe,  and will look upon our testimony as a fable.’ Francesco Petrarch

 

Somewhere near the estuary of the Don,

with its mudflats and meanders, north

of the Sea of Azov, and somewhere

near the Volga Delta, with its pelicans

and flamingos, north of the Caspian,

on the steppe lands are black rats and fleas

and yersinia pestis. The rats

like human warmth, and the fleas can leap.

 

The Mongol khanate of the Golden Horde,

recently converted to Islam,

had closed the Silk Road for religious reasons.

Italian merchants in Kaffa, Crimea,

notwithstanding held their fort. The Mongols

besieged the Christians and, withered by the plague,

so it is said, threw the corpses of their dead

over the ramparts. The merchants decamped.

 

The bacterium was borne along trade routes –

in holds of ships and folds of clothing.

In eight years the Black Death killed fifty million.

There was collateral damage – in Strasburg

and all of Rhineland the burning of Jews.

It probably brought about the end

of the feudal system, and undermined

the Pope’s domination, making the world

free for capital, enterprise and invention –

like mariners’ astrolabes, matchlock guns,

the Atlantic Slave Trade.

 

 

 

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POETRY

APOCALYPSE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read409 views

Via Del Corso, Rome, March 2020.

The boutiques had been closed by decree, even

Calvin Klein Underwear and Brooks Brothers.

The only pedestrians were the Pope,

in his white robes, and his bodyguard,

in bulging suits – on a pilgrimage

to the ancient church of San Marcello

set back from the street. Beneath a crucifix,

used to assuage a 15th century plague,

Pope Francis prayed to God to stop the virus.

 

The street, in Roman times, was Via Lata –

Broad Way – and ran through the Field of Mars

towards the Adriatic. At Mardi Gras,

in the Renaissance, the Ghetto was emptied

and the Jews paraded along the street

so that the Christians could mock and scorn.

 

Italy’s churches had been closed by decree –

except in the north where some were being used

as temporary morgues, from which corpses

were taken, for cremation, day and night,

by slow convoys of army lorries.

 

Like riderless horses around a race track,

history repeats and repeats, and God,

who was thought to be dead, may merely be deaf.

 

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POETRY

THE MUSEUMS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read818 views

For Sizwe Vilakazi

 

ROBBEN ISLAND, CAPE TOWN

 

Except when the Atlantic fog surprises,

from high ground in the city the island

is present like a leviathan,

its lights at night like white phosphorous,

a place of banishment since the first ships,

among seals and penguins.

 

DISTRICT SIX, CAPE TOWN

 

Razing its streets, clearing this cosmopolis

of Asians, atheists, Blacks, booksellers,

Buddhists, Christians, Coloureds, cooks, Hindus, Jews,

musicians, Muslims, seafarers, Whites,

this is what it was all about – the racial

myths, the scorn, the humiliation,

the torture, the killings – to justify

the theft of property.

 

APARTHEID, FREEDOM PARK, JOHANNESBURG

 

Beneath the Pillars of the Constitution,

in the gardens the weaver birds are knitting

their elaborate nests from grass and reeds

precariously over water.

 

Inside is the Mercedes workers hand built

for Mandela, and a BAE designed

troop-carrying Casspir, mine and bullet proof,

to patrol the townships.

 

HECTOR PIETERSON, ORLANDO WEST, SOWETO

 

When the school children took to the dirt streets

in their uniforms and walked as one

towards the dogs and the guns and the police,

did each of their rulers secretly know

they were finished – not then or that year

but in time however many they maimed,

and killed and tortured in front of cameras –

yet kept it to themselves? Did they believe

really that righteous anger would, could

be suppressed forever?

 

 

 

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POETRY

CIVIL WARS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read606 views

After the horsemen and the slaves, before
the Stalins and the Hitlers, were the skilful
cities – cosmopolitan, pragmatic,
loud and solemn with towers, spires, domes.

There are some who would reprise a fictive past,
revert from countries of convenience
to imaginary nations, ignore
the corrupting legacy of empire,
the corrupted remittance of colonies,
oil trumping Crusades and martyrdom.

Europe could break like a slate across old
fault lines – a slate smudged with alphabets.
Europe could rub out its history.

There are swastikas in Brick Lane and Berlin,
lampooning in Paris and Soho.
When liberty is assassinated,
freedom is curbed by the rationale
of abhorrence, the politics of outrage –
Jews, Christians, Muslims, the conflicted peoples
of The Book confounded. So, whose Europe?

The cities are filled still with parks and squares.
Storks, pigeons, starlings roost above music
and commerce. After the horsemen and the slaves…

 

 

 

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