Tag Archives

English

POETRY

TEATRO DEI RIUNITI

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read473 views

The Tiber’s olive waters curve past

Umbertide or, rather, the town curves

to the river in this limpid valley

alive with oak trees, willows, poplars

and millennia of settlements,

monuments – Etruscan, Roman, Lombard.

 

To impede the German’s retreat northwards,

the Allies bombed the bridge across the river

successfully and, collaterally,

razed a block of tall, narrow houses –

and many of their inhabitants.

 

The house numbers are brass inlaid in the setts

of what is now a car park in this

medieval town with its Via Papa

Giovanni XXIII, its Via

Kennedy, its Piazza Carlo Marx.

 

The Eighth Army built a bailey bridge

on the ancient arches – which was still there

when we performed Shakespeare, in English,

at the theatre. Unused and derelict

because of the war, the baroque theatre

was renovated by an alliance

of Communists and Christian Democrats,

I Riuniti. It had been a gift

from the town’s most famous son, Domenico

Bruni, a castrato, emasculated

for the usual reasons – poverty, greed.

A celebrity acclaimed and enriched,

he sang in Rome, Naples, Milan, London

and St Petersburg for Catherine the Great.

 

He might have stood by the deep canal

that channels the winter torrents through the town

from the mountains into the Tiber.

Our play was The Comedy of Errors,

in which one of the lads from Syracuse says,

‘He that commends me to mine own content

Commends me to the thing I cannot get.’

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read473 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.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

SOMETHING LOST IN TRANSLATION

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read451 views

We are in the thronging, discordant food hall
at Euston Station, London, sipping
a latte and an americano from Caffé Ritazza,
taking the first bite of our Upper Crust bagettes –
mozzarella & tomato, pastrami & emmental –
while looking out for the disabled pigeon
that hops, scavenging, under the tables,
when we are approached, politely, gently,
by a bearded man with a shabby shoulder bag
from which he presents us with
an asymmetrically trimmed piece of paper
comprising a printed list, which appears
as if processed on an Amstrad PC:
‘I am a deaf mute.
I have no work.
I have a family to support.
Please help me, for the love of God.’
He also leaves a professionally produced
Romanian (we think) prayer card.
We notice he has disseminated the sheets
and the cards to all the tables
in our vicinity. He returns for the harvest.
Some give, most do not. We contribute more or less
the tithe of our meal. He takes his printed sheet,
leaves us the card, nodding his unsmiling thanks.
He moves on. The cacophony returns.

On the Virgin train to Crewe, we log-on.
‘Maica Domnului’, the prayer begins
– Romanian, ‘Mother of God’. (The giver
may be Roma, we think – informed judgement
or prejudice). It is, we deduce,
St Augustine’s intercessory prayer.
On the front of the card an icon
of the Virgin and Child is reproduced.
Mother and son are appropriately doleful.
She points to him, as if saying, ‘He is the one’.
Perhaps we have been conned. Maybe
our meek beggar has an apartment at Canary Wharf,
with those other cartoon characters,
The Masters of the Universe, and our modest gamble
will not have paid off. In English, as in Romanian,
‘charity’ and ‘justice’ are Latinate words. The British,
like the Roman Empire, kept the concepts distinct.
Interestingly, in Hebrew, one word encompasses both.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

THE EDGE OF HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read522 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.

 

 

 

 


Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

THE FALL OF EMPIRES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read456 views

On the manicured corniche between Elounda

and Plaka – before the balconied hotels

that rise up the mountainside tier by

expensive tier – is the Turkish Governor’s house,

abandoned for nearly a century.

We venture up the steep, pitted drive

but sudden howling from unseen dogs

deters. On the opposite side of the bay,

where only widows on donkeys go,

the shore is festooned with plastic bags

shredded by the tides and bleached by the sun.

The foundations of the antique city

of Olous shimmer beneath the water.

 

The French dug a canal, near the salt pans

the Venetians laid out, between the bay

and Mirabello Gulf. The Canal Bar,

ruined now – the owner’s wife died, his daughters

left to work in gift shops in Heraklion –

was popular with tourists, mostly Brits.

Elounda is populous with ex-pats.

Imperial Airways’ Short Brothers’

flying boats, en route from Southampton

to erstwhile Bombay, would refuel nearby

and passengers overnight at an hotel

in the town – among them Churchill, Ghandi.

 

From our table at Plaka’s Giorgos

Taverna, we are fanned by zephyrus airs

and see the deep blue of the bay and the isle

of Spinalonga – first a Venetian

then Ottoman fortress, then lazaret

(in effect, a leper prison) and now

a heritage site. Inmates sometimes

would swim for freedom across the bay.

The Werhmacht was stationed here. For sport,

soldiers would shoot, night or day, at fugitives.

 

We are eating grilled kefalos – mullet –

with aubergine au gratin and frites,

and drinking bottles of Mythos beer.

The couple at the next table are French. They are

treating their Spinalonga guide to lunch.

He speaks English. They do not. They ask us

if we speak French. We reply haltingly.

The young waiter, who is Albanian,

steps forward, deferentially. He informs us,

modestly, in the relevant languages –

that he speaks some English, French and Greek.

Emboldened by our immediate respect,

he tells us he is a first class graduate

of the modern language faculty

of the University of Tirana.

‘Balkans is no good now!’ he exclaims.

So exiles become polyglots. A youngish

Israeli family – father, mother,

twin girls – arrive. We hear the children’s

bubbling Hebrew while they all study

the menu outside. As they enter,

the waiter greets them in English. They respond.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

CONFEDERATE CEMETERY, ALTON, ILLINOIS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read430 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.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments

Recent Posts