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POETRY

DRIVING INTO THE DARK

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.1K views

For Annabel Honor-Lissi

 

In those stark dreams when sleep shades into waking,

dreams that haunt the light like a taste in the mouth,

or a name half-remembered, half-forgotten,

I am always travelling – this dawn

along the black tops and the turnpikes,

from the Texas Panhandle north east

to Casco Bay, Maine. Ahead is the thought

of moments, or a non-stop two day drive:

from the sun-belt’s stubborn, garish pandemic;

via the fame of Dallas, the sentient

battlefields of the civil war, the rusting

foundries of the east, to stand on the bay’s

windy shore; and contemplate an island,

where black and white war refugees lived

as one – until the prospect of profit

evicted them, and dug up their graves.

The New Meadows River and the Atlantic

swirl round the verdant ruin of Malaga.

Are lost chances ever redeemable?

But no dreams end where they should. The sun

is already setting as I cross

the Red River into Arkansas.

A storm is coming westwards from the Great Plains.

The darkness I am driving into gleams

with centuries of rain.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THINKING OF AMERICA

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

‘Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force.’

MAKING AMERICA WHITE AGAIN, Toni Morrison

 

Twenty five years ago – the year of the First

Gulf War, the launching of the World Wide Web,

the repeal of South Africa’s Apartheid Law,

and the ‘End of History’ – one August

Saturday in Godfrey, Illinois –

a town on the Mississippi bluffs –

I watched the wooden New England style

Church of Christ at Monticello cross the road,

on hydraulic jacks, to the Lewis & Clark

Community College campus. The crowd

was affable, and overwhelmingly white.

A marching band played ‘Tie a yellow ribbon’,

and Old Glory was in abundance.

To cheers the steeple bell was rung and rung.

 

The college had been the Monticello

Female Seminary, founded in

1835 by Captain Godfrey –

a retired fisherman from Cape Cod –

for whom the town was named. He believed,

‘When you educate a woman you

educate a family’. He admired

Thomas Jefferson – Founding Father,

president and conflicted slave owner –

so named the finishing school after

his primary Virginia plantation.

 

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark –

U.S. Army officer volunteers –

were commissioned by President Jefferson

to map the West, mind the French, impress the Sioux

and expand the concept of the thirteen states

beyond the confluence of the great rivers.

They set off from the banks of the nearby

Wood River and crossed the Mississippi

to sail up the Missouri to its source

two thousand miles away in the Rockies

across the lush and pristine Great Plains.

 

*

 

In the small town on the limestone bluffs

where bald eagles nest above the river

Adams, Washington, Franklin et al

would have felt at home that August day,

recognising most present as descendants –

collegial,  patriotic, Anglophone,

Protestant and white. Now, across the vast

darkling fields of the republic, they would hear

incessantly Jefferson’s prescient

‘…the knell of the Union…this act

of suicide…of treason against the hopes

of the world…a fire bell in the night…’

clanging, clanging, clanging.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE STREET PARTY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.8K 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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