Gallipoli

POETRY

ROSEBUD

By David SelzerOctober 29, 20200 Comments2 min read1.5K views

‘It is the most humble day of my life,’ Rupert Murdoch

Beech trees, in full leaf, more than a hundred years

high in the park a street away from here,

rise sheer like raggedy cliffs, a last hurrah

of pragmatic philanthropy – like Rome

before the fall – amid the indifferent

splendour of empire: town halls designed

like palaces, museums like town halls.

It dies spluttering in Flanders mud, choking

in dugouts on Gallipoli’s cliffs.

Rupert Murdoch’s dad, a Sydney Sun (sic)

hack, who had the ears, surprise surprise,

of politicos north and south, exposed

Anzac carnage on Ottoman shores,

and brought the boys back just after Christmas –

so doing good through cunning, his means

justified by his goal, the goal always right.

As Citizen Kane aka Randolph Hearst –

one of the first tycoons of the gutter press,

war monger, dirt disher, future mangler –

lay dying, “Rosebud,” was the last he said:

a small, wooden sledge, the name in floral white,

his curtailed childhood tangible among the

vast, serried desert of his acquisitions.

High above the beeches of St James Park

the Dirty Digger watches from his penthouse

as white pelicans – a gift from Russia

for Charles II, who knew a thing or two

about dads – rise from the lake in the park,

fly towards the Palace then wheel back

over Horse Guards and the MOD,

the birds – their call a grunt and a whine – for some,

a symbol of the Passion on the Cross.

The Breaker of the English-speaking world plots

what lie he will tell Death.

Note: the poem has subsequently been published in EAP: THE MAGAZINE Winter 2012: Errors of the Gods – https://exterminatingangel.com/rosebud/

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

GERTRUDE BELL AND THE TREATY OF SÈVRES

By David SelzerAugust 30, 20181 Comment2 min read1.8K views

Paris, 1920

The treaty was signed in the Exhibition Room,

overseen by Marie Antoinette’s

dinner service. Like porcelain owls’ eyes,

they were witnesses of the delegates’ harsh

geometry, the fretwork jigsaw of desk

wallahs – Ottoman Mesopotamia

become modern Syria and Iraq.

Gertrude Bell was one of the delegates:

daughter of a philanthropic iron master;

Oxford graduate like T.E. Lawrence;

cartographer, mountaineer, linguist;

archaeologist, administrator,

public servant; Arabist, Al-Khatun,

‘Queen of the Desert’; poet, fluent

in Farsee, translator of Hafiz;

confidante of seraglios, anti-

Suffragist; anti-Zionist, maker

of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq.

London, 1915

Between postings, lobbying powerful men,

as always, to let her be useful,

she continued her letters to ‘Dick’,

Charles Doughty-Wylie, career diplomat

and soldier, the unrequited, married

love of her life – eclectic letters

of Whitehall gossip, geo-political

tactics, romantic longing, and sorrow

for the Great War’s slaughters. Her last letter

was never finished. She had learned

of his death in action at Gallipoli.

Baghdad, 1926

She died from an overdose of sleeping pills.

There was no evidence of suicide.

King Faisal, the monarch she had made and whom

she was finding ‘difficult’ of late,

watched, from the shade of his private balcony,

the coffin carried through the dust to the thump

and blare of the garrison’s brass band.

He could see the Tigris beyond the graveyard.

His grandson’s disfigured body would be hung

from a lamp post near the square where Saddam’s

prodigious statue would be toppled with ropes.

‘To steadfastness and patience, friend, ask not
If Hafiz keep–
Patience and steadfastness I have forgot,
And where is sleep?’

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POETRY

EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES

By David SelzerMay 21, 20154 Comments2 min read2.2K views

For Alex Cox

‘I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.’ Winston Churchill

As usual, he dresses for town
in anticipation of the King’s summons –
which never comes. After breakfast, he reads
The Times and the Daily Telegraph, notes
Ghandi’s lenient sentence of six years
in prison without hard labour – then,
reflecting on unrest throughout the Empire,
puts on his smock and his homburg and strolls,
cigar lit, the short walk to his studio.
He pours a small portion of Johnny Walker –
the bottle kept always with a clean glass
on the bench he sits on to paint – and adds
a measure of Vichy water. He is working
on a painting of his son reclining
in a deck chair on a terrace in Leghorn.
After the third glass he dreams as usual.

He captures Peter the Painter personally
at the Siege of Sidney Street. Gallipoli
is a famous victory. He leads
his country in war and is returned to power
by an ever so grateful nation. He wakes
and paints in the features of his wayward
son named for his own wayward father.

After the fourth he dreams again. He persuades
the King, at last, to order the razing
of Liverpool as punishment for
the seamen’s strike and the policemen’s strike.
At first light on a soft summer dawn
the dreadnought battleship HMS
Nemesis drops its anchors opposite
Wallasey Town Hall and trains its 15 inch
guns firstly on the Three Graces. He wakes
suddenly as he always does knowing
that, viewing the devastation from the
Avro Bison flying north above
the ruins of West Derby Road, he would see
the few Celts who survived fleeing to where
they had no place, the Lancashire hinterland –
west to the lush, orderly market gardens
of The Fylde and east to the cotton towns,
bustling, regimented. He has a fifth,
lights a cigar and strolls back for lunch.