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Civil War

POETRY

DANCING ON AIR

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read650 views

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.

Meditations In Time Of Civil War, W.B. Yeats

 

There are barricades at both ends of the street.

They have been building for a couple of days –

a skip, a burned-out pick-up, rotten timber.

Someone appears at our door at dusk or dawn,

claiming to be from one side or the other,

begging, asking, demanding contributions –

that folding chair, this old garden bench,

alcohol, books. So far only our region/district

is in turmoil, or in righteousness –

the utilities uninterrupted.

Drones are overhead. We may see ourselves,

and our predicament on the internet.

Our neighbours have gone, deserting their houses.

 

Possibly in time each faction will attempt

to commandeer our house, a salient –

the lead valley in the roof overlooks

one barricade, a side window the other.

Each night, once the little one is sleeping,

we review our long term options: surrender,

or starve. Short term we are optimists.

We read, draw, tell stories, play the piano.

 

A colony of wild bees these last few weeks

has occupied the nesting place in the eaves

starlings abandoned perhaps a decade ago.

With the little one we have studied them,

each day, dancing on air.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE TROUBLES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read397 views

The dying corporal was spread eagled

in his underpants, his executioners

and judges – a mob of fathers and sons –

dressed, as he had been, undercover,

in trainers, denims and a sweater.

 

Civil war, for almost a generation,

had burgeoned. Solutions receded. Rights

gained were matched by rights removed: all our freedoms

lessened so neighbours might vote, have jobs,

houses. Things did not make sense, only words.

‘Derry’ was a political statement.

 

Instant demagoguery occupied

newsprint and tv screen with the candour

of hatred and the clichés of righteousness –

“…these people…” Not to understand, only

to condemn, betrayed our humanity.

 

Technologies enhanced, determined

response: the Smith & Wesson, neglected

in the shoebox under the bed, replaced

by coded warnings to tv stations…

The night, which could be anywhere, was on fire.

Unseeing, the parade of errors

swaggered into the dark.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE EDGE OF HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read531 views

From the holiday cottage near the top

of Allt Goch Bach – Little Red Hill – west

and south is ancient woodland of ash, oak,

beech and holly. North, down the steep incline,

is Beaumaris – with its redundant castle,

gaol and quays, its narrow streets and low,

thick walled houses. East are the Menai Straits,

the A55 and the Carnedd range.

 

Some say the ‘red’ was the blood of the last

of the Druids – or the Royalists.  Now

the hill is covered with spacious ‘80s

bespoke bungalows for wealthy pensioners.

From here, there is a landscape of invasion:

Roman, Saxon, Viking, Plantagenet

(Norse, of course, by any other name) –

and, last, the so-called ‘English’ (residents

and tourists), accidental imperialists.

Inland, Welsh thrives. Here, it is seldom heard.

 

On Sundays, stray notes and chords from the town’s

brass band drift up – Italian opera,

a Methodist hymn. I cherish this place:

the hill; the town; the changing beauty,

shapes and colours of the tidal straits

and treeless mountains; the sense of being

always on the edge of history.

Where I live, over the mountains, far away,

is now a disunited kingdom – violent,

corrupt, gangrenous with injustice and greed.

 

 

 

 


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POETRY

CONFEDERATE CEMETERY, ALTON, ILLINOIS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read437 views

All of the names of the dead are Celtic

or English. Most of them died – in the prison

near the river –  from typhoid rather than wounds.

Nobody set out to be cruel – farmers’

sons killing farmers’ sons. Their graveyard

above the bluffs was grassed, an obelisk built,

their names cast in bronze, bolted to limestone.

From the highway, there is no signage.

Eagles winter on the  bluffs. America’s heart

is green and fecund: a confluence –

Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE EMBRACE OF NOTHING

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read507 views



i

Rome’s legionnaires quarried its sandstone cliffs

and Ptolemy put the Dee on the map.

William the Conqueror, in winter,

force-marched his army over the Pennines

to reach the river and waste the town – the last

to submit.  For eighteen years, Prince Gryfyd

ap Cynan, shut in the keep, heard only

the river’s voice, dyfrdwy, dyfrdwy.

Parliament’s forces sent fire rafts downstream

to purge besieged citizens. On its banks,

King Billy’s infantry was camped

while, in the silting estuary, his fleet

provisioned for Ireland.

ii

The winter I had scarlet fever

my mother read me Coral Island.

While I was deliriously admirable –

with Ralph, Jack, Peterkin – Mao’s Red Army

crossed the Yalu. One person’s commonplace

is another’s Road to Damascus.

When the Apprentice Boys shut fast the gate,

they had the Pope’s blessing.

iii

Standing on the leads of Phoenix Tower

(eponymously, King Charles’), he saw

his cavalry routed on the heath, scattered

through its gorsey hollows and narrow lanes.

Watching Twelfth Night,  Charles crossed out the title

on his programme and wrote, ‘Malvolio –

Tragedy’. He was a connoisseur of

defeats. ‘I’ll be revenged.’

iv

On a Whit Monday, long before bandstand,

suspension bridge and pleasure steamers,

two watermen rowed an outing of girls.

When one of the men threw an apple,

they jostled to catch it. Shrill scrambling

upturned the boat and drowned them, lasses and men…

A school acquaintance, bright, admired, sculling

late on a December afternoon,

somehow – where the river curves like a sickle

round meadowland – upset the skiff and drowned

beneath that ‘wisard stream’.

v

Even here are Principles and the Sword.

Two Christian martyrs share one monument

on Richmond (then Gallows) Hill: George Marsh,

John Plessington, Protestant, Catholic –

distanced by three monarchs, a civil war,

a regicide and a little doctrine –

each burnt by the others’ brothers in Christ.

When Bobby Sands had starved himself to death,

some houses flew black flags.

vi

In the ten minutes or so it took me,

one bleakly raw February-fill-the-Dyke day,

to cross the ‘twenties suspension bridge,

pass the Norman salmon leap and weir,

return across the 14th century

three arch sandstone bridge to where I started,

by the bandstand with cast iron tracery,

the rising river – awhirl with the debris

of factories,  mountains, centuries

– had covered the towpath.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE EMBRACE OF NOTHING

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read761 views
Chester, View from a Balloon, John McGahey, 1855

i

Rome’s legionnaires quarried its sandstone cliffs

and Ptolemy put the Dee on the map.

William the Conqueror, in winter,

force-marched his army over the Pennines

to reach the river and waste the town – the last

to submit.  For eighteen years, Prince Gryfyd

ap Cynan, shut in the keep, heard only

the river’s voice, dyfrdwy, dyfrdwy.

Parliament’s forces sent fire rafts downstream

to purge besieged citizens. On its banks,

King Billy’s infantry was camped

while, in the silting estuary, his fleet

provisioned for Ireland.

ii

The winter I had scarlet fever

my mother read me Coral Island.

While I was deliriously admirable –

with Ralph, Jack, Peterkin – Mao’s Red Army

crossed the Yalu. One person’s commonplace

is another’s Road to Damascus.

When the Apprentice Boys shut fast the gate,

they had the Pope’s blessing.

iii

Standing on the leads of Phoenix Tower

(eponymously, King Charles’), he saw

his cavalry routed on the heath, scattered

through its gorsey hollows and narrow lanes.

Watching Twelfth Night,  Charles crossed out the title

on his programme and wrote, ‘Malvolio –

Tragedy’. He was a connoisseur of

defeats. ‘I’ll be revenged.’

iv

On a Whit Monday, long before bandstand,

suspension bridge and pleasure steamers,

two watermen rowed an outing of girls.

When one of the men threw an apple,

they jostled to catch it. Shrill scrambling

upturned the boat and drowned them, lasses and men…

A school acquaintance, bright, admired, sculling

late on a December afternoon,

somehow – where the river curves like a sickle

round meadowland – upset the skiff and drowned

beneath that ‘wisard stream’.

v

Even here are Principles and the Sword.

Two Christian martyrs share one monument

on Richmond (then Gallows) Hill: George Marsh,

John Plessington, Protestant, Catholic –

distanced by three monarchs, a civil war,

a regicide and a little doctrine –

each burnt by the others’ brothers in Christ.

When Bobby Sands had starved himself to death,

some houses flew black flags.

vi

In the ten minutes or so it took me,

one bleakly raw February-fill-the-Dyke day,

to cross the ‘twenties suspension bridge,

pass the Norman salmon leap and weir,

return across the 14th century

three arch sandstone bridge to where I started,

by the bandstand with cast iron tracery,

the rising river – awhirl with the debris

of factories,  mountains, centuries

– had covered the towpath.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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