God

THE ISLE OF PORTLAND

By David SelzerJanuary 25, 20241 Comment2 min read2.2K views

The Bibby Stockholm – an accommodation

barge containing asylum seekers – is moored

in Portland harbour, from where quarried limestone,

laid down in the Late Jurassic period,

has been shipped for many centuries.

‘The star-filled seas are smooth to-night

From France to England strown;

Black towers above the Portland light

The felon-quarried stone.’

Not unreasonably it was assumed,

on social media, where he was named,

that the man who was heard screaming on the barge

at 3.00 a.m. was the one who later

committed suicide. It was, in fact,

someone else’s wretched, anguished son.

‘On yonder island, not to rise,

Never to stir forth free,

Far from his folk a dead lad lies

That once was friends with me.’

Text book neo-liberal economic

theory is operating here: the market

decides who may be given a chance to live.

To escape from havoc and torture,

to cross continents and shipping lanes,

requires some money, desperation, and courage.

‘Lie you easy, dream you light,

And sleep you fast for aye;

And luckier may you find the night

Than ever you found the day.’

Renowned for being both durable

and workable by masons, Portland stone

was used in building St Pauls Cathedral

in London, and the United Nations

in Manhattan, for example. If God

were to exist he or she would have to be

totally impervious to irony.

Note: the quoted verses in italics are the three quatrains that comprise A.E. Housman’s THE ISLE OF PORTLAND, number LIX in his A SHROPSHIRE LAD sequence.

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THE BANDED DEMOISELLE

By David SelzerAugust 27, 20202 Comments2 min read2K views

If Ezekiel’s watchman, or, rather, God’s

had been on the job there would have been

some sort of heads-up – a cornet perhaps

if not a fanfare – that the Parish Church clock,

put in place in 1867,

would be chiming again, hours and quarters,

this summer morning. But it just happens –

almost surreptitiously, like some

member of the chorus in an opera

sneaking on late from the wings. And late it is

by a few minutes – as before it was fast.

Such churlishness, some would say, is tantamount

to treason – as the Prime Minister

of one of the earth’s richest countries,

though singlehandedly it seems fighting off

phalanxes of invisible foes, finds time

to fly to the Orkneys for a photo-op

with a couple of large crabs on the deck

of a trawler in Kirkwall harbour,

and speak with officer-class passion about

the abstract benefits of the Union –

the English monarchy’s first colonies –

whose strength has helped us through…and will again…

As Benjamin Franklin – who chased lightning,

with an iron rod, on a horse – once said, “Tricks

and Treachery are the practice of fools,

that do not have brains enough to be honest”.

And I recall that the name of the church –

built in local sandstone for a burgeoning,

provincial bourgeoisie – is All Saints,

so no bases or bets left uncovered there.

Nevertheless, when I hear the chimes

and watch my live-in gardener – whom

I have loved for nearly sixty years –

building a rockery in assorted stone

with alpines and lavender, there is some sense

of re-setting if not re-winding the clock.

Suddenly, out of the purple buddleia –

an import from China, nationalists

should note, that self-seeds particularly well

in ravaged, industrial wastelands –

a dragonfly appears, metallic green,

with fluttering wings, translucent, pale,

and disappears somewhere beyond the hosta

and the agapanthus. I learn, instantly,

it was a female banded demoiselle,

its habitat slow-moving muddy streams.

Beneath the garden and the house – a fort

against the dark – was a pond and a brook

speculative builders filled with rubble

more than two decades before the church was built.

That fragile creature of breath-taking beauty,

like a prophetess, divined the lost waters.

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MADELEINE MOMENTS

By David SelzerMarch 24, 20171 Comment2 min read1.8K views

‘And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine…’

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, Marcel Proust

The day the season’s second Atlantic storm

was due there was I – after a sausage

and bacon bap with brown sauce and an Earl Grey

in the heritage station’s draughty café –

celebrating my 74th birthday

with my small family in a British Rail

standard compartment on the Santa Special.

We journeyed from Llangollen to Lapland

(aka Carrog) with mince pies, miniature Baileys

for the adults and juice for our granddaughter,

who gave me a cartoon sestych entitled

‘My Grandpa is amazing – he does…’.

She appeared with me in each frame as I

talked, shopped, word processed, cooked, travelled and read.

We passed pastel shaded December fields,

empty copses filled with russet leaves,

and bleak hawthorn hedge rows festooned with a wild

clematis – Travellers’ Joy or Old Man’s Beard.

Someone, despite the notices, had left

a window open in the corridor,

so, as we went through the long Berwyn Tunnel,

it yellowed with billowing sooty smoke

that seeped under the compartment’s door.

It was a madeleine moment: crossing

sulphurous bridges, waiting on ill-lit

platforms amongst gouts of steam and fog,

shuddering reflections in carriage windows.

As we climbed, we left the river – by turns

meandering through meadows then white water –

to still slowly gouge the valley bed,

and we had a visit from Santa himself,

with Elves, bearing gifts. Our granddaughter

was appropriately shy and polite

though she is calculatedly and/or

patronisingly agnostic about

F.C. – and reasonably sure God is

imaginary and certain there is

no such thing anywhere in the universe

as zero gravity. I am certain

I still believed when I was nearly 7.

The world seemed an obscurantist place.

At Lapland, we queued to pose with Santa

et al for a photo op on a sledge.

It began to drizzle. In the waiting room

a coal fire was burning in the grate.

My grand daughter hugged me. I felt gravely

light of heart and head, warmly welcome

in the universe – and thought suddenly

of a world garlanded with Old Man’s Beard.

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THE DESERTED WAGON

By David SelzerOctober 17, 20141 Comment1 min read1.9K views

It was county council green, wooden, with
metal-rimmed wheels and a curved roof
like a Roma caravan, and a triangular limber
for towing by clanking, ponderous steamrollers –
before petrol driven lorries took the road menders
to and fro in what, for a time, would have seemed
like no time at all. This one – abandoned pre-war –
was parked, throughout my childhood, on the verge
at a country cross roads.

It entered my dreams. I thought God worked there,
hunched in his robes above an operating table,
serious in his beard, bringing forth babies.

Whenever I approach that cross roads,
I remember the dream and being a child
and the image of God, though God
and childhood have long been abandoned.

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JUBILEE

By David SelzerMay 29, 20122 Comments2 min read2.3K views

‘Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound…and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.’ Leviticus 25:9 & 25.10

Much of the chapters and footnotes of England’s,

though not Britain’s, history are scribed here

in stone and iron – Roman Walls, Norman weir,

marshalling yards – the rest is on paper,

of course, and from hearsay. It is said,

for example, for Victoria’s Jubilee,

in our street, lilac trees were planted.

Some have survived changes of taste or neglect.

This city, where I have lived most of my life

by chance then choosing, is shaped by the Dee,

that brought wine and the Black Death from Acquitaine,

powered the long defunct tobacco mills and still

draws occasional salmon from the oceans.

I imagine them waiting in the deep currents,

fattening on sand eels, squid, shrimp, herring,

and then the long, fasting haul from west

of Ireland, homing for their breeding grounds.

A cormorant perches on the salmon steps.

The last of the fishermen is long dead.

Like the calls and wings of Black-headed Gulls,

blown by April storms, the names and titles

of princes echo from the neutral sky

and sound through the deferential streets.

No doubt, there will be the splendid nonsense –

the cathedral’s ring of bells will peel

and the Lord God Almighty will be urged

repeatedly to ‘save the Queen’. So,

let the ram’s horn blow like a trumpet

through Mammon’s and God’s obsequious temples –

and ‘…proclaim liberty throughout all the land…’

Almost which ever road you take westward,

in the distance, are the Welsh hills. The Legions

exiled the Celts from here – Saxons et al,

with legal threats and occasional killings,

kept them out except for trade and prayer

but forbade their songs. Now, waiting, we

are everywhere. Let the ram’s horn sound.

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