Tag Archives

Gaza

POETRY

PLANETARY ALIGNMENTS

David Selzer By David Selzer8 Comments2 min read3.1K views

Against a greyish backdrop of an entire

block of concrete apartments in Gaza –

hapazardly demolished by aerial

and/or artillery and/or tank

bombardments – a photograph in Haaretz

shows a group of ten female soldiers

in olive green posing relaxedly

for a selfie. I do not know their names.

They are somebody’s daughters, who, no doubt,

would consider themselves and probably are

generally decent, and well meaning.

 

In another Haaretz photograph,

about an hour and half away by car – the time

it would take me to drive from here to Blackpool –

is a ten year old West Bank boy called Amro,

a name which means ‘To Live a Long Time’.

He has a serious look on his face

as he poses for the camera.

He is holding up a flannelgraph version

of the Solar System, which he has made.

 

I do not know what has become of the young women

posing like tourists among the ruins.

 

Sitting on the family car’s front seat

with his dad and his seven year old brother,

Amro – for no apparent reason, by design

or accident – was shot in the head,

and died. The bullet was fired by a young man

in a purpose-built concrete watch tower.

 

 

Note: Here are the links to the two photographs described in the poem and published in Haaretz on 20.3.24 & 16.3.24 respectively –

 

https://img.haarets.co.il/bs/0000018e-5d2a-d4b2-afcf-dfbe35cd0001/83/0a/07a1ddba4a94a9bc052eaacac8e1/033102.jpg?height=488&width=840

 

https://img.haarets.co.il/bs/0000018e-4466-d1ed-a7ef-55772e9c0000/ea/b3/bca7876c40a1a4f00e71ffc9afd3/55974219.JPG?height=960&width=960

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
8 Comments
POETRY

REMEMBERING GAZA

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read3.3K views

Hitler – to avenge the assassination

of Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector

of Bohemia and Moravia,

and one of the Holocaust’s chief architects

– ordered the isolated mining village

of Lidice (twenty miles from Prague)

to be razed, and males over fourteen shot.

The women and children were deported

to Chelmno and gassed. The barbarism

is still echoing around the world.

 

The Nazis en route to capture the oil fields

of Baku, besieged Stalingrad, blitzed it

with bombs and artillery then entered –

only to be shot at by snipers from each

windowless tenement and rubble-strewn

courtyard. Winter came, and the cannon-fodder

battalions of the Russian Army.

The Germans – outnumbered corpse for corpse,

surrounded, cold, starving – surrendered.

 

When the remaining Jews in the Warsaw ghetto

discovered the truth about the trains to the east,

about their destinations, and the purpose

of those destinations, those who were not yet

too traumatised by humiliation

and hunger felt able to resist.

Between them they mustered six revolvers

and built an arsenal of Molotov cocktails

and bits of masonry. They resisted

the Wehrmacht and the SS for four months,

and received no help from the Allies.

 

And, no, no parallels are being drawn

or analogies being made, only echoes

being heard. Lidice was a war crime,

Stalingrad a rout, The Warsaw Ghetto

Uprising nemesis. Lidice’s ruins

have been preserved as a memorial,

Stalingrad re-built then renamed again,

the razed ghetto’s borders marked in remembrance.

The Third Reich lasted for barely a hundredth

of its vaunted one thousand years, and never

reached the oil fields beside the Caspian.

 

Under the sea floor off the Gaza Strip,

and in Gaza itself, far, far below

the tunnels, and in the West Bank,

are oil and natural gas deposits,

enough to make all the peoples between

the river and the sea comfortably off –

unless or until the whole earth were

to become unliveable.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

THE HAZARD OF FAILURE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

‘I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above…’

AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH, W.B. Yeats

 

For David Press

 

One of the pitman painters from Ashington,

Jimmy Floyd, explained that he had depicted

the shed in a painting green like the grass

because he had run out of yellow

the intended colour. Better the wrong shade

than an allotment without a shed.

 

***

 

According to Gertrude Stein, that mistress

of ironies, the real and only reason

for Picasso’s Blue Period was

he had a lot of blue paint left over –

though the barefoot trio in the ‘Tragedy’

on that chill shore would be wretched and hopeless

in any colour from the spectrum: a man,

a woman, a child, the little boy

touching his father with one hand, the other

stretched towards his mother, who stands head bowed,

a little apart, watched helplessly by the man.

 

***

 

The poet, Refaat Alareer,

who was killed in an Israeli air strike,

foresaw his death. His last poem begins:

‘If I must die’. He says that after his death

‘you must live/to tell my story/to sell

my things/to buy a piece of cloth/and some strings’

and make a white kite ‘with a long tail’

so that a fatherless child in Gaza –

‘awaiting his dad who left in a blaze’ –

might look up, and momentarily

imagine ‘an angel is there’.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

HISTORY LESSON

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.2K views

Gaza, according to the Old Testament,

was, directly or indirectly,

frequently in receipt of God’s wrath,

most spectacularly when the Jewish giant,

Samson – who had been there whoring – was blinded

by its unsavoury residents, and bound

to the pillars of their heathen temple.

He brought it down around their ears, and his.

Millennia later, John Milton wrote:

‘Gaza still stands, but all its Sons are fall’n’.

 

***

 

Once, when we were learning about some outrage

or other, our history teacher observed

that there were two types of human being:

those we could imagine invading our homes

in the dead of the night, assembling us

in the street, and harrying us onto the trains

for Auschwitz – and those we couldn’t. Though perhaps

some of my peers wondered who they might be

it never occurred to me I would not be

one who felt for the oppressed: for the Jews,

of course, the Irish, Roma, Kurds,

Palestinians – all the migrant

and indigenous peoples of the earth,

defiled, displaced, diminished, denied.

 

***

 

The history of humankind seems to be one

of small tribes continually warring over

small plots of land that might produce

the odd pitcher of milk and honey.

And, it seems, in any particular place

or time, the tribe that gets to write the book gets

to invent the past or tell the truth, gets to

destroy the present or make it, gets to

determine the future.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

OCTOBER MOON

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.8K views

That Friday night, a slow moon rose, blood-orange,

huge, over the sea’s horizon. Trails of clouds

were silhouetted across its deserts

like black smoke. Next morning, a drear sea-light

filled the rented cottage in the dunes

by the shore. A heron was wading slowly,

purposefully along the water’s edge.

 

He had gone to that tiny, remote island

off the Atlantic coast, accessible

at low tide across a sand bar, to finish

his latest book: ‘Looking The Other Way –

Genocide In Rwanda’. He was working

on the index. He had reached Complicity.

 

Prompted by a text from a friend late

on Sunday he turned on the tv news –

saw pictures of that Saturday’s massacre:

edited images of the aftermath

of the murder of innocence, and real-time,

incriminating footage of armed men

oppressing distraught women and children,

taking hostages for ransom or slaughter.

 

The days then weeks that followed were lit

by the graphics of the after effects

of the bombardment, the deliberately

chosen response – a life for a life,

a death for a death, rubble for rubble.

And gaslit by hours of talking heads

oozing bombast, lies, and casuistry.

It was a time too illuminated

by the courage and humanity

of the living victims of loss and horror.

 

Each day he would walk along the shore

round the island until he could see

the range of mountains inland across the fields.

The peaks were increasingly hidden in shifting mists.

The hedgerows of hawthorn and traveller’s joy

edging the fields were turning to yellow.

He would think of the fire-bombing of Dresden,

of the razing of Lidice, of Stalingrad –

and of Goya’s painting of two giants

clubbing themselves to death as they sink

ever further into a bog, like some

danse macabre of self-destruction.

One day he suddenly thought of the books

in his study at home, a collection

of sixty years, and was overwhelmed

by their number, their seeming irrelevance.

 

He watched the progress of the moon as the month

waxed and waned: sometimes obfuscated

by clouds, or smoke, or dust; sometimes bright as

a ‘bomber’s moon’. The stars appeared. The sun rose

above the horizon. The sea ebbed, flowed.

And thousands, thousands of children were slaughtered.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

THE NAKBA

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

‘…mourning and sorrow shall end,
when I return to Jerusalem…’

Mediaeval Jewish Prayer

 

‘We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.’

Mahmoud Darwish

 

On a land mass that is the size of landlocked

Rutland, the smallest county in England,

Gaza, the Earth’s third most populated

polity, has two small rivers  and a hill.

Its city, four thousand years ago,

was the site of a Pharaonic fortress.

 

Though the Jordan is inaccessible,

nowhere in the Strip is more than eight miles

from sandy beaches and the ‘Great Sea’,

the dark blue ‘Sea of the Philistines’.

 

During the so-called Suez Crisis,

as the invading Israeli infantry

reached the outskirts of Gaza City,

refugees from the Nakba – ‘catastrophe’,

‘disgrace’ – left their faded British Army tents

and clapped, thinking the young soldiers had come

to take them all back home.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments