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cuckoo

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THE TEARS OF CHRIST

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.8K views

‘He beheld the city, and wept over it.’  Luke 19.41

 

We went up Mount Vesuvius by bus,

and stood on the rim of the crater

watching gases emerge from fissures.

We bought two bottles – a red and a white –

of the local wine, Lachryma Christi,

 for a fellow atheist from the gift shop.

As we walked back down the fertile slopes – the sea

before us, hazy, tranquil – we heard

a cuckoo. All of Campania seemed stilled –

as if it were spring in a lost England.

 

When we visited the ruins of Pompeii

later we strolled wherever we wanted

unescorted, through bars, behind shop fronts,

into decorated brothels – and lounged

beside empty pools in the atria

of the houses of the very rich.

On a sunny April day – the odd sparrow

hopping and cricket chirping, with the gentlest

of winds off the Bay of Naples – among

those tidied, geometrical remains,

the end of days was unimaginable!

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

KISMET

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

i.m Alan and Claudia Dench

 

After much diligent work in the stable –

helping brush out, adding water to the oats –

our grand daughter rode Harold round the paddock.

My cousin watched from the terrace, anxious,

encouraging, while her husband led the gray

as she sat astride, in all the right gear,

with all the natural seriousness

and dignity her five long years had taught her.

 

It was spring there in the narrow valley

an hour or so drive from the Pyrenees.

The snow melt was rushing through the stream.

The banks of the lanes were tangled

with celandine, violets and cranesbill.

A doe broke cover on the high pasture

and a cuckoo called from the distant woods.

But the reins remained safe in her small hands.

 

There is something ancient, archetypal

about a human on a horse – power,

respect, empathy, symbiosis.

I smiled at my cousin and nodded, thought of

our ghosts – her mother, my parents, theirs;

motley, eclectic generations –

acknowledging our brief destiny, that

infant, that horsewoman.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

I have not heard a cuckoo here since childhood

when fields were wilder and trees less sparse.

I heard one this year in Gascony,

on the Plateau de Lannemazan,

on a wooded ridge with the late March winds

from the Pyrenees rasping the corn stubs

in the field below and rushing

through the budding trees bright with lichen

and ruffling the flowers on the blackthorn

and the violets among the leaf mould.

 

Between a gap in the trees the ridge way

was bare limestone. There were walnut shells

and empty 12 bore shot gun cartridges.

Before me, down the slope, was the village

that was a town until the Black Death –

fortified to subdue Basque and Occitan.

The clock on the Mairie struck a muffled hour

but the fell bird sang clearly over the wind.

 

As I descended the lane I passed a field

where an English ex-pat’s donkey brayed at me,

a Belgian’s house with dogs that yelped and howled

and a hunter walking up towards the ridge,

his gun broken on his arm. I heard dogs

and donkey distantly as he passed them –

and knew the wild woods would soon be silenced.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

VALLE CRUCIS, LLANTYSILIO, LLANGOLLEN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

Valle Crucis Abbey, Richard Wilson, circa 1760

 

 

Where willow stoops in curling shallows, May

stirs branches that creak like rigging or rub

like silk. The cuckoo sings its unsettling,

solemn roundelay. Sun gilds the abbey’s

west wall. The glassless rose window is a

blinded eye in a Romanesque skull –

indulgence in a wilderness. The Blood of

the Lamb coursed through the old ways of Keltoi,

Celtae, Celts. Time the dissembler leaches

the earth of language, artefact, intent.

 

A wall in the south transept was scorched by mishap

or mayhem. Dousing the flames, did the monks

break their vow? The Reformation empowered

even Trappists. Rulers destroy or endow

for glory. Defenders of parliament

effaced the cross (placed on a pagan mound)

carved to honour the Princes of Powys.

Even at the world’s furthest edge, even

beside an unkempt road through a valley,

was always a junction of opposites –

the classic, classical dichotomies

of the cerebellum and the soul, of

carapace and substance, tyranny and

learning. An oak tree, shaped like a brain, spins

the sun’s threads and is cleft, halved – fire and leaf.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE SUBURBS OF FOLLY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

OR CARE IN THE COMMUNITY


People new to the neighbourhood soon notice,

rising from one of the walled gardens

or the terraced yards, an occasional

bird call – wood pigeon or even cuckoo?

Distracted by the previous owners’ always

doubtful detritus, it takes them longer

to realise the sounds are human though

of indeterminate age and gender.

Exchanging a Victorian madhouse

for a gentrified Victorian suburb,

making ambiguous bird noises rather

than rocking to and fro in the urine-stink

must be better – but no less sad, no more

purposeful, still unconscionable.

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