Christmas

POETRY

FIELD AND FOUNTAIN, MOOR AND MOUNTAIN

By David SelzerNovember 24, 20220 Comments1 min read522 views

The pandemic’s lockdown rules having been eased

we crossed the border into Wales to visit

our favourite country seat, on a late autumn’s

sunny day, cold and dry. The car park

was almost empty – and the main yard,

where the hay loft was and the saw pit,

entirely so except, this being

close to Christmas, Bing Crosby, disembodied,

singing ‘We Three Kings…’ Out in the gardens

two mothers and four infants cheerily

followed the Peter Rabbit Winter Trail,

running to find Lily Bobtail, Tommy Brock,

then Squirrel Nutkin. Rooks gathered in the limes,

and a magpie crossed the lake loud with mallards.

In one of the borders orange flowers

were still blooming – alstroemeria,

Lily of the Incas – and in another

an ornamental banana tree burgeoned,

testament to the earth’s slow burning.

The sky was filling with cumulus clouds

whiter than snow, drifting slowly from the north,

as we returned to the yard where Bing

was still singing of the Magi, a journey,

and a star. The late afternoon was full

of innocence and design, theology

and intimations, children, obligations.

We left, careful on the winding lanes,

wondering if Peter Rabbit had been found.

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POETRY

THE FAULT

By David SelzerDecember 27, 20161 Comment1 min read364 views

Unlike those of us whose curse is to live

in interesting times, those who walk dogs

is to have their pampered pooch revert

to the wilderness and find body parts –

as there on the shore on the bonny loch

at Christmastide, just at the point

where the road turns sharp right from the shore

and up the bank, where Rob Roy drove the kine

he had ‘stolen’, the geological fault line

where lowland and highland meet, the frontier

of so much English sponsored butchery.

In the 3 star hotel with its wall-to-wall

tartan carpet, we spoke of little else

over yuletide lunch and buffet supper.

What dog? What owner? What parts? What killer?

On Boxing Day storms came, trees fell, guests left.

At home, in the south, we saw the bulletin –

a lad on a Christmas Eve piss-up,

seduced, dismembered, broadcast to the waters –

and wondered as so often before

what species we belong to. And thought

of the anonymous dog walker

alive to all that impartial beauty –

the stillness of the ancient pinewoods,

the snow on the mountains reflected in the lake

in that troubled, emptied land – calling the pet

gnawing at the pebbles.

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POETRY

SEAFORTH BEACH, SIMONSTOWN, 2009

By David SelzerSeptember 30, 20161 Comment1 min read530 views

‘The essential characteristic of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common – and must have forgotten many things as well.’ What is a Nation? Ernest Renan

Near the restaurant’s toilets, there was a large

framed print of a photograph of the beach

full of day trippers from Cape Town by train

one Christmas/New Year break in the ’50s –

when it was Slegs Blankes/Whites Only.

The restaurant’s customers were still white,

the staff black – by Toyota taxis daily

from the townships. On the beach, that windy

September day, African Penguins –

erstwhile ‘Jackass’ – were braying at the surf.

A Southern Whale and its young rose close

inshore and blew… From the bedroom window

of our three star guest house we could see,

in the moonlight, a young black man lay down

to sleep on the grassy bank near the sea’s edge.

In the morning he had gone. A submarine

sailed from the naval base, sounding its horn.

We watched a mist roiling slowly towards us

and the dark kelp bobbing.

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POETRY

SERENDIPITY

By David SelzerDecember 22, 20159 Comments2 min read871 views

Pursuing our Holy Grail of finding
four balloon back Victorian dining chairs
in good condition, we drove, to furthest
Cheshire – near where the motorway grows
and the villages have Anglo-Saxon names –
the second Saturday before Christmas
to an antique centre once a dairy farm.
In seven erstwhile milking sheds, covering
fifty thousand square feet, were displayed
a range of products of the industrial
revolution – A Hornby train set,
a tractor seat, a Singer sewing machine,
a framed, signed photo of Edwina Currie,
a Parker-Knoll chair, a room full of plastic
Disney figurines, etcetera,
etcetera. We ate an over priced
toasted sandwich each and left chairless.

Heading home, we stopped, on a whim, in Nantwich –
one of Cheshire’s three ancient salt towns –
where you had spent your early adolescence.
This was the pub your parents ran, there
was where the Girl Guides met, here where you
and your best friend Joan took each other’s snaps
with a Kodak Brownie. We entered
St Marys, the fourteenth century
parish church – grand as a cathedral – Joan
had ten years later been married in.
A choir was rehearsing a Christmas concert.
We sat in the loud stillness churches make.

As we drove to Chester on the A51,
twelfth century Beeston Castle was
silhouetted in ruined splendour
against a sunset of streamers of pink
tinged with grey. We talked of the singing
we had chanced upon and, almost wistfully,
of that long, eclectic tradition
seemingly transcending time and fashion
as if it were something substantial not
a trick of stone or shadow.

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STAGE PLAYS

HEAR THE DRUMS

By David SelzerSeptember 30, 20110 Comments1 min read519 views

This full length stage play focuses on Jamila, a sixteen year old girl of mixed Afghani and English parentage: on her struggle to determine her cultural identity, her longing for her father whom she has been brought up to believe is dead but whom she discovers, by chance, is alive and a prisoner of the Americans in Afghanistan – and her confronting the lies and misunderstandings that have had such tragic consequences for her family.

You can download the main text as a pdf:

HEAR THE DRUMS MAIN TEXT

A list of characters, information about where and when the action is set and acknowledgements are also available as a pdf:

HEAR THE DRUMS – CHARACTERS, LOCATION, ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ETC.

Note: the play was a prize winner in the Sussex Playwrights’ Club 2009 Full Length Play Competition.

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