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flute

POETRY

REFLECTIONS ON IMMORTALITY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read626 views

From our bedroom window I can almost touch

the laburnum’s tresses of yellow blooms.

The tree was here before we moved in

fifty years ago. Most years it has fountained

flowers – which, from a distance, seem golden.

A quarter century is the likely span

of a laburnum. Though this tree is on

borrowed time bees congregate regardless.

 

Perhaps being featured in one of my poems

has encouraged its longevity:

‘…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….’

 

I am long beyond my allotted span

of the psalmist’s ‘three score years and ten’,

and take note of her/his admonition:

‘…if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,

yet is their strength labour and sorrow;

for it is soon cut off, and we fly away’.

I shall be good enough only for ashes

the wind might scatter. This tree, however,

might make music.

 

Note: the poem mentioned above is AN AFTERNOON IN MAY.

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

AN AFTERNOON IN MAY

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read809 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 Edwardian 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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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

BETWEEN THE MONKEY AND THE SNAKE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read766 views

We flew to Marrakech one January –

from dark, frosty, early morning Gatwick

to a view of the sun on the snow-topped

Atlas Mountains. Barely six hours from home,

we were in the Souk – ‘La shukran! Non merci!’ –

avoiding the blandishments, noting

the bartering and the credit cards. Relieved,

we emerged into the Jemaa el Fna,

the Marrakech Medina’s vast square,

with water-sellers, jugglers, magicians,

henna tattooists with their sample books,

peddlers of herbal medicines, dancing boys,

acrobats, story-tellers, traders of

mint, dates, olives, kumquats, lemons, cumin,

the ancient start and end of caravans

south and east across the Sahara.

 

Suddenly, in all that charivari,

you heard a charmer’s flute. ‘Cobras!’ you cried

and rushed unwarily away, me

hurrying after. You stopped – the flute now

out of earshot – only for a macaque

monkey, dressed in a powder blue suit

and a fez, to tap you on the shoulder.

 

The monkey was chained and the snake, no doubt,

de-fanged but I could not relieve your fear.

Love has its short term limitations.

You were lost and found and lost again

between the monkey and the snake.

Then the plangent notes of the mid-day call

to prayer sang from the city’s seven mosques

and you were found again in sudden beauty.

 

 

 

 

Note: The poem has subsequently been published at

http://thirdsundaybc.com/2012/03/18/vol-1-no-2/

 

 

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