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Great War

POETRY

UNDER THE LIME TREES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read512 views

For Mike Rogerson

 

The layout of our local park was finished

the year my mother was born, the year

before the Great War was started, and named

for Alexandra Saxe-coburg and Gotha

née Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg,

widow of the late King. An avenue

of lime trees – and a single row along

another path – was planted. My mother,

the Spring of the year she was war-widowed,

pushed me in my pram beneath them.

 

Berlin’s Unter Den Linden avenue –

that stretches from the Brandenburg Gate

to the razed imperial palace –

was named for a medieval poem of love

and lust that became a song. ‘Under

the lime… sweetly sang the nightingale…’

As the Red Army encircled the city,

the last of the trees was felled for firewood.

 

In the scullery of the house we shared

with my mother’s mother, her two sisters

and their step-brother (gassed at Ypres),

the draining board and the mangles’ rollers

were made from lime, and the piano’s keys

in the back room. Under the lime trees

in the park my granddaughter races,

still carefree of history’s absurd

ironies – and, oh, so many loving ghosts.

 

 

 

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POETRY

GERTRUDE BELL AND THE TREATY OF SÈVRES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read508 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

KITCHENER’S ISLAND

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read401 views

Our felucca tacked across the river Nile

to Aswan from Kitchener’s Island –

with its well watered botanical gardens

and its straight boulevards of tall palm trees –

gifted to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum,

pre Great War, as Egypt’s Consul-General.

 

As we approached the east bank, out of nowhere

it seemed, a boy appeared along side us

in a small zinc bath paddling with his hands

and singing, “‘Michael, row the boat ashore!

Hallelujah!'” – the old slave song learned then turned,

with chutzpah and courage, back to enterprise.

“Please give him anything but money,”

urged our Egyptologist guide, alumnus

of Cairo and Yale. “We must not become a

nation of supplicants.” A fellow tourist

gave him a packet of paper handkerchiefs,

another some sweets. The rest of us

had nothing but money. “Shukran!” he called,

and waved graciously encompassing us all.

He paddled off. “‘Boastin’ talk will sink your soul!'”

I thought, cheeky beggar – ‘Your Country Needs You’!

 

 

 

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POETRY

FOLLOWING THE CHAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read608 views

The photograph could have been taken anywhere

they forged the Royal Navy’s anchor chains –

Dudley, Newcastle, Ponypridd or here

in Saltney, Chester, reclaimed marshland

near the river. Wherever the Sea Lords chose

to give the contract the chain makers

and their families moved – like funfair folk

or circus people – if they were able.

 

There are thirteen men in the picture – a shift

about to go on judging by the spotless

faces, arms and hands. They are not burly men

though their biceps were developed hauling,

rolling, beating, linking the molten iron.

There is no fat on them – despite the buckets

of draught beer the employer provided

to hydrate them in the purging foundry.

 

They are pale, working in the dark except

for the furnace glare. They have been posed –

by some Edwardian photographer

keen to record the locality –

in their full length leather aprons, some with caps,

some bare headed, three with mufflers to wipe

the sweat from their eyes, four with waistcoats.

They are sons of blacksmiths, grandsons, village lads,

from the coast, from the hills, from the valleys.

 

The ones in front are on one knee, with sledge hammers

and tongs, a length of chain at their feet. Unused

to cameras, some look at the lens – like two

kneeling – or away like the one at the back

with his tash and his thumbs in his waistcoat.

He was Simeon Harris – my wife’s grandad.

 

After the Great War the contract moved. He stayed –

married by then to his best friend’s widow,

responsible for two sets of children –

and never worked again, living on the dole,

the rare rabbit snared on the Duke’s estates,

the very occasional shared salmon

lifted without licence from the river,

his wife’s pittance for cleaning the chapel,

soup from the workhouse for breaking stones.

 

The day before he died – his wife scolding him

for idling – he sat, on the back step,

smoking a roll-up, his muffler hiding

the cancerous lump on his neck. My wife,

then nine years old, sat close. He whispered to her,

‘I feel bad today, love’.

 

 

Note: first published 2016.

 

 

 

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POETRY

INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read627 views

That Easter holiday when I was nine,

I filled the days of lakeland drizzle

with the contents of the hotel’s bookcase.

I remember one page from a Great War

history. Only the uniform

denoted humanity. What could have

been a face was a smear in sepia

mud. Wars and the aftermath of wars

shaped childhood. In brief sun, we visited

Wordsworth’s schoolroom with its harsh, scrawled desks.

I was fussed to a snapshot. And there I am

scowling at the brightness…

 

 

 

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POETRY

FOLLOWING THE CHAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read592 views

The photograph could have been taken anywhere

they forged the Royal Navy’s anchor chains –

Dudley, Newcastle, Ponypridd or here

in Saltney, Chester, reclaimed marshland

near the river. Wherever the Sea Lords chose

to give the contract the chain makers

and their families moved – like funfair folk

or circus people – if they were able.

 

There are thirteen men in the picture – a shift

about to go on judging by the spotless

faces, arms and hands. They are not burly men

though their biceps were developed hauling,

rolling, beating, linking the molten iron.

There is no fat on them – despite the buckets

of draught beer the employer provided

to hydrate them in the purging foundry.

 

They are pale, working in the dark except

for the furnace glare. They have been posed –

by some Edwardian photographer

keen to record the locality –

in their full length leather aprons, some with caps,

some bare headed, three with mufflers to wipe

the sweat from their eyes, four with waistcoats.

They are sons of blacksmiths, grandsons, village lads,

from the coast, from the hills, from the valleys.

 

The ones in front are on one knee, with sledge hammers

and tongs, a length of chain at their feet. Unused

to cameras, some look at the lens – like two

kneeling – or away like the one at the back

with his tash and his thumbs in his waistcoat.

He was Simeon Harris – my wife’s grandad.

 

After the Great War the contract moved. He stayed –

married by then to his best friend’s widow,

responsible for two sets of children –

and never worked again, living on the dole,

the rare rabbit snared on the Duke’s estates,

the very occasional shared salmon

lifted without licence from the river,

his wife’s pittance for cleaning the chapel,

soup from the workhouse for breaking stones.

 

The day before he died – his wife scolding him

for idling – he sat, on the back step,

smoking a roll-up, his muffler hiding

the cancerous lump on his neck. My wife,

then nine years old, sat close. He whispered to her,

‘I feel bad today, love’.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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