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Eden

POETRY

AUTUMN RISING

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read4 views

The air has a Mediterranean warmth,

and September has barely begun, yet

the Japanese cherry’s annual

alchemy is already underway –

making the green into soft gold, the gold

into bright copper. For the birch, the acer,

plum and fig summer prevails. Butterflies

are on the ivy, bees on the sedum

 

From where I sit in this healing Eden

the turning leaves appear like links of metal

plaited. In due course, they will untangle,

fall, decay. This is a complacent place.

East of Eden, ignorant armies

are mustering, while children go hungry.

My watchwords are: Be kind! Be  unforgiving!

 

This morning’s sky was a pinkish, orange

overcast – dust particles from sand storms

in the Sahara, blown overnight

by southerly winds, leaving a fine layer

on recycling bins, and on the car.

Tomorrow is my annual CT scan

– free moon-shot technology to check

nothing hidden and untoward progresses.

Such investment in an old man’s future!

This may be the last time, the doctor says.

Proper sentences end with a full stop –

proper poems with ambiguities.

Wind chimes – made from a small bell, and pierced,

hand-carved coloured stones threaded on strands of twine –

stirring in an unexpected shift of air,

ring gently out of sight.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

CIRCUS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

Days after we had travelled east of Eden

we invented clowning and slapstick,

juggling and tumbling, magic and music,

and idleness to ease our banishment

from Paradise. So, for ninety minutes,

in this rare and aerial space of changelings

and kaleidoscopes, we watch acrobats

and clowns, conjurors and knife throwers turn back

the epochs as if pages in a book.

 

Like a sudden rush of snare drums, a brief

and heavy shower accompanies

the finale – but we emerge from the big top

into that special freshness after rain.

The church bell is tolling for evensong.

As if there were no sin, house martins

swerve and bank and twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A SORT OF EDEN

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read1.9K views

“Did you not hear me ask Sir Thomas about the slave trade last night?…There was such a dead silence.”

MANSFIELD PARK,  Jane Austen

 

It is fitting in certain English novels

that there should be significant absences

in Bath or London, journeys of consequence

to the colonies, and banishments

to darkest Dorset or a coastal town.

It is appropriate too that there should be

rain of whatever kind falling frequently,

forcing protagonists and antagonists

to be housebound, introspective, suffer

ennui, or propinquity’s temptations,

abroad be obliged to seek shelter

with doubtful neighbours, or an unsuspecting

friend who will, in due course, become the bride or groom.

 

When Sir Thomas returned from Antigua –

having spent a whole year in person

ensuring his sugar plantations were in profit –

he ‘was grown thinner and had the burnt,

fagged, worn look of fatigue and a hot climate’.

When Fanny Price returned to Mansfield Park,

from her self-exile with her parents

in squally Portsmouth, it was spring in landlocked

Northamptonshire green with English rains.

 

Mansfield Park became, in due course – when all

had received their (more or less) just deserts –

for her a sort of Eden. Whether Sir Thomas

ever thought he heard, out in the parkland,

foul oaths, whips cracked, and thought he saw black backs

bowed we will never know.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SURELY

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

So many years of marriage should be marked,

they say, by china – the product, of course,

not the place. So a sturdy mug for us

from the Five Towns – or a translucent

teapot from Nanking? China, it is:

willows by a stream, a template of an

eastern Eden and, on the bridge, two –

or three? I know a better token.

 

Two pear trees in our daughter’s garden were

remnants of an orchard before the town grew.

A jasmine, a grapevine and the trees

had grown together in sure companionship.

With fruit (albeit a tad vintage!), leaves

for modesty, dappled shade in sharp sun,

rich perfume on a summer night, you –

a surely unbreakable paradise.

 

 

 

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