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POETRY

LAISSEZ FAIRE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.7K views

‘Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.’ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.

 

I am contemplating, in the Walker Art Gallery,

Liverpool, the statue of William Huskisson, once

the city’s Tory MP and sometime President of the Board of Trade

but much better known as the world’s first railway fatality

at the opening of the line to fetch cotton quickly and cheaply

from the Mersey’s docks to the mills of South East Lancashire.

(He died at Eccles, where the cakes come from).

His widow paid for the sculpture. He holds a scroll

and is dressed as a Roman senator. He is a tad

more lithe than in later life – or death – and his thinning hair

has been carved to indicate maturity rather than age.

(The vandalised statue was removed from his mausoleum

in St James’ Cemetery). He was hit by Stevenson’s Rocket,

while ingratiating himself with Wellington, the Iron Duke

and old Etonian, famous for the observation

that  Waterloo ‘was won on the playing fields of Eton’.

 

The gallery is part of a vast piazza-type space

of splendidly grandiose late Victorian constructs –

civic society made manifest in stone – Museum,

Library, Assizes, St John’s Gardens, St Georges’ Hall,

St George’s Plateau, Lime Street Station, inspired by local,

civic pride, funded by the Atlantic slave trade’s proceeds.

 

More or less round the corner is Scotland Road – the centre

once of working class migrant diversity: Irish, Welsh,

Scottish, Italian, German, Polish, English – its MP

until 1929, an Irish Nationalist –

its male workforce pre-dominantly dockers.  Post war

the river began to empty. Citizens of Liverpool’s slums

were scattered through Cheshire to places where

manual labour was needed – for a time. There their off-spring languish.

 

On St George’s Plateau, in 1911, was announced

a national seamen’s strike, which became a national transport strike.

Churchill telegrammed the King that the end of Empire was nigh.

The Hussars entered stage right, opened fire.

Two strikers died, both Catholics: John Sutcliffe, a carter,

shot twice in the head, Michael Prendergast, a docker, twice in the chest.

Working class men killing working class men so public school boys

could play in safety and nouveau riche tycoons

make dynastic fortunes for their children.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF VENICE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.1K views

DECLINE AND FALL

 

Once, there were no panhandlers in La

Serenissima. Now there are four beggars –

men from Dalmatia, the old colonies,

and a Roma woman with no past.

Near the Rialto, two alternate

on the same pitch: heads sunk, hands out, their stories

in English on cardboard. The third plays

an accordion near the Accademia,

his history on plywood at his feet.

Only the woman, dark-eyed, distressed, who sits

anonymous, huddled, swaddled against the

long wall of the Ospedale Civile,

looks charity the tourist in the eye.  She

takes the last  vaporetto  for Torcello

– and disembarks somewhere in the dark lagoon:

but returns always as if she were any

other traveller on the chopped and dancing

water, under the pellucid sky, in the

serenity of the light.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE STREET PARTY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.7K views

Above every Mairie flaps the Tricolour.

On every lawn, in every yard through the gut

of America – where the Great Plains began

before the farmers came with wheat and pigs

and soya fields – Old Glory flutters.

Above the reception desk in every

riad in Morocco the king’s photo hangs.

Here, things are never that unambiguous.

 

In a street near the foot of the Downs,

too steep for tables, they have strung bunting

from house to house, moved cars, hired a leaning

bouncy castle and shared barbecues.

 

This chalk, grassland common – that slopes upwards

to the flint ridge with its Pilgrim’s Way,

from Winchester to Canterbury,

for a Norman priest killed by Norman lords –

is a (mostly) English floral lexicon:

Meadow Cranesbane, Meadow Vetchling, Yellow-rattle,

Dove’s Foot Cranesbill,  Common Spotted Orchid.

 

A Skylark ascends from the unmown grasses.

I think of Vaughan Williams’ orchestral piece,

with its shimmering solo violin,

the George Meredith poem which inspired it –

‘He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake’ –

Celts evoking the essence of what was theirs.

 

The party dwindles as the drizzle arrives.

To be English is to be contrarian –

not being Irish, Scots, Welsh or ‘foreign’.

At the top of the street, a patriot with

a large, St George’s Cross drooping above

the privet hedge, has lit a bonfire

in a garden incinerator.  The rain,

now heavy, drums on the lid and, though sodden –

being dressed in England football strip –

he forces wet, tabloid newspapers down

the narrow funnel. Acrid smoke wafts up.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A VIRTUOUS CIRCLE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.8K views

In an ex-pat’s yard – Flemish or Dutch

the name on the gate suggests – the guinea fowl

panic. Two Booted Eagles are circling

down the valley from the ancient forest

of verdant oaks and chestnuts, sectoring

the yellow fields of maize and sunflowers

toward Monléon Magnoac, a village

now but once, before the Black Death, a new town

on a fortified hill top, one of more

than a thousand to soothe the wilderness

of Aquitaine, Languedoc and, here, Gascony

then English aka Norman crown estate.

Yet this was Basque country long before Norsemen

sailed through the Bosporus or up the Volga.

 

Northern Europeans have returned

as tax paying owner occupiers

rather than liege lords – an irony

which nobody appears to acknowledge.

 

After a night of rain, the river Gers,

rising in the Pyrenean foothills,

chases through the valley bottom.

It will broaden across the Magnoac

Plateau and flow into the Garronne,

and so into the Bay of Biscay,

Bizkaiko Golkoa in Basque – a gulf

of legendary storms and shipwrecks.

 

Impervious, as yet, to the almost

all determining past, she has found

a clayey puddle. She stamps and jumps.

The rich, pearly water rejoices.

 

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POETRY

CONFEDERATE CEMETERY, ALTON, ILLINOIS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K 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.

 

 

 

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