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Edwardian

POETRY

AN AFTERNOON IN MAY

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.2K views

By our side gate the old laburnum – whose wood,

in time, may make a chanter or a flute –

is in bloom. I look up through its branches.

There is a little azure and smidgens

of green – and droplets, ringlets, links, chains

of cascading yellow, a torrent of gold.

 

***

 

Our Victorian neighbourhood fills

with the machined roar of twin turbofans.

An Airbus Beluga – more Arctic whale

than Caspian sturgeon – with cargoes

of worked metal from Toulouse, banks low

over the churchyard’s antique horse chestnuts.

 

***

 

A heron, crossing from one river

to another, beats above our chimney pots,

and three swifts, harbingers, curve through the blue.

A blackbird, perched on the laburnum’s

aureate halcyon canopy,

imbues the street with song.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

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

Snapped black and white in Kodak Verichrome,

more than seventy years ago, by an aunt

with a Kodak Brownie, I am supine

in a small pram. The park’s avenue

of lime trees in leaf suggests May

and therefore me, coverless, five months.

My fingers are clasped and bare feet are crossed,

like an effigy’s or a lounge lizard’s.

I am awake and eyeing the camera,

through half-shut lids, like an insulted

potentate – or an about-to-be-mardy

baby.  Behind me, in the distance,

is the spire of the Victorian

sandstone parish church, in the middle ground

tennis courts and someone serving.

 

Beside me, in sharp focus (on a bench

with concrete ends and wooden slats, ‘There’s-

a-war-on-you-know’ weeds burgeoning

beneath it) my mother, a handsome woman

with rich, auburn hair, a war widow since March –

her ancestors Welsh seafarers, some drowned,

some landlocked.  She is almost smiling.

 

Most days, in all seasons, we walk the park,

an Edwardian legacy, named

for Queen Alexandra, a fashionista

mother of six, a loather of Prussians –

being a daughter of a Danish king –

and disabled over time by her deafness,

then slowly losing speech and memory.

We talk of the present – how our daughter laughed

on the swings and now her daughter does.

 

 

 

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POETRY

NEVER SUCH INNOCENCE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

Beneath the Edwardian village hall’s
high ceiling, under its oak hammer beams,
beside the Roll of Honour ‘For the Fallen’,
a squad of four year olds does the Conga, plays
The Farmer’s in his Den, Passes the Parcel.
The birthday girl is dressed as Spiderman –
her choice – eschewing Snow White, Rapunzel.

The backcloth of the proscenium stage
is a painting of part of the village
in halcyon shades of early summer –
the elm-lined road from the hall to the church.
There are eighteen names on the Roll – initial,
surname – rankless and ageless in death.

She snuffs out the candles with one breath.
We sing the song, share the cake and play
one last game of Musical Statues.
Everyone wins. Party bags in hand,
goodbyes and thank yous said, children exhausted,
adults relieved, we turn off the lights –
to leave the hall’s long wooden wall clock,
electrified now, to click past each
unrelenting minute.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SEAMUS HEANEY: A LIVERPOOL MEMORY

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.1K views

After the reading, we strolled down Brownlow Hill

for a Guinness and a chaser at The Vines

next to The Adelphi on Lime Street –

a Walker’s pub in Edwardian baroque.

The westering sun lit the stained glass windows.

 

We were both young men then. He had been married

the year before. I would be married

later that year. His first book had been published

by Faber and Karl Miller’s prescient review

seemed genuinely to bemuse and amuse him.

We talked of the city’s sectarian split –

the Orange annual march, with drums and fifes,

to Newsham Park, their annual outing

by train to Southport past the Scotland Road flats

festooned with green – curtains, tablecloths.

 

The University was generous

with expenses and paid for a taxi

to Speke.  He had a flight booked to Le Touquet

and a hire car there he would drive through the night

into Italy to join his wife.

He was so unostentatious, so

matter-of-fact, that such travel plans

seemed perfectly ordinary to someone

who had no licence and had only

been abroad on a school trip to San Malo!

 

As he got in the cab and we shook hands,

I knew I had met a particularly

memorable person – modest, kind

and witty – who happened also to be

especially, exceptionally talented.

 

When I opened The Door Into The Dark

some three years later and read ‘Night Drive’ –

 

The smells of ordinariness

Were new on the night drive through France;

Rain and hay and woods on the air

Made warm draughts in the open car.

 

Signposts whitened relentlessly.

Montrueil, Abbeville, Beauvais

Were promised, promised, came and went,

Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

 

A combine groaning its way late

Bled seeds across its work-light.

A forest fire smouldered out.

One by one small cafés shut.

 

I thought of you continuously

A thousand miles south where Italy

Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

Your ordinariness was renewed there.

 

– I knew I had been privileged and lucky

that summer evening to shake hands with

a compassionate genius, romantic,

urbane: a maker of exquisite art

out of the everyday.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2K views

Curtains drawn against late October twilight,

working on verses about burgeoning flocks

of raucous, emerald Ring-necked Parakeets

in the Surrey Hills, I hear the murmur

of girls. It is Halloween. The bell rings.

There is a bevy of neighbours’ daughters –

one with a painted face, all on the cusp

of womanhood – lovely, ingenuous.

 

From habit, I watch them safely down the street

and then, before I shut the door, look up

at the night sky, craning my neck with wonder.

Cloud obscures all but Jupiter, Mars, Venus.

It would be tempting to believe not merely

in physical forces and chemical

reactions but design and purpose

through the kaleidoscope of the universe –

and in the countless stars’ unheard music.

 

After supper, I begin another piece:

about the Ghetto in Golden Prague –

with its learning, its music and its art –

which Hitler decreed should be preserved as

a raree show for ‘Judenrein Europa’.

Daily, new stones are placed on the tomb

of Rabbi Judah Levai ben Bezalel,

Talmudic scholar and Kabbalistic mystic,

legendary creator, from Vltava mud,

of The Golem to scourge the anti-semites,

and battler with Azrael, the angel of death,

to protect his only granddaughter.

 

***

 

In the opposite corner of the room

in which I write is an Edwardian

upright piano, an inanimate

companion since my early childhood.

Our granddaughter asks to be lifted

onto the too high stool and tries the notes,

now loud, now soft,  with the flats of her hands,

hearing with wonder the unending sounds.

 

 

 

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