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commonwealth

POETRY

UBUNTU

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read770 views

The play had finished. There were a hundred

or so children of Orange Farm township –

a large, informal city of mostly

shacks, few paved roads, limited clean water.

These seven, eight, nine year olds lucky enough

to be in school had shrieked with fearful delight,

laughed with wonder, their imaginations

transforming the double classroom’s bare,

austere walls into Dumisani’s

journey through English, Sotho, Venda

Xhosa, Zulu so he could play his drum.

 

To thank us, their teacher asked them to sing

a hymn, ‘Waiting at the Gate’. I expected,

as at home, unsteady voices reaching

for monophony but no, here, each child

sang the harmonious line that suited

her or him, an infinite polyphony.

 

I can see them still – serious, confident,

as if what really mattered to them then

was the eternity beyond heaven’s gate

the words long for – and hear them now, their

culture’s joyful, heartbreaking harmony,

that commonwealth of sound.

 

 

 

Note: UBUNTU has been posted on June 16th – Youth Day in South Africa.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE REDUNDANT MAHOUT

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read509 views

In the balmy, barmy days before conservation,

our local zoo had an Indian elephant

which gave rides, complete with howdah

and mahout. He had been recruited

from Kerala and he and has family

settled, as Commonwealth citizens,

in a small, suburban semi within sound

of imitation jungles and savannahs.

 

In time, the circus animals deserted

or were abandoned, and, as the

euphemism has it, ‘he lost his job’,

becoming a porter at the train station

(when there were such posts) –

‘Jaldi, jaldi, haathi!’ was replaced by

‘Porter, porter, sir?’ I recall him

dour in his British Rail uniform –

and, appropriately moustached,

grinning astride the elephant’s neck.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ANGEL OF THE NORTH

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read413 views

At my back is Durham’s Romanesque

Te Deum. I turn my face to the sky

and this wonder – forged in a commonwealth

of system, iron and grace by private

genius out of public patronage,

on the grassed remains of a pithead baths.

 

Wherever you are in its vicinity,

in its line of sight, you can look nowhere else –

at its span, its height, it wings; at the

uncompromising power, unambiguous

vitality. When you look directly,

it is earthed but ready to soar – from your eye’s

corner, just about to take off or land.

 

It is rusting, except where children sliding

have polished its feet. It seems naturally

an ‘it’, not androgynous and neither

female nor male. It seems like the solar wind,

a flood tide, a stand of birches, winding gear,

a lathe, a mould. I read the graffiti;

note the engineers’ marks; count the rivets;

conjure the subtle, oh, gentle throb

of enormous wing beats; feel the skill,

the grasp, the joy; imagine the steady

tremor of turbines. Celebrating life,

prefiguring death, this weighty messenger,

this kind harbinger, welded like a ship’s

hull, embraces the air.

 

 

 

 

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