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Greece

POETRY

LOOK ON MY WORKS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

If you stand in the Central Court of Knossos –

or in what is assumed to be the court –

and look north you can see, above the trees,

the top of the white geodesic radome

of a US air force tracking station

outside the hillside village of Gournes

less than ten miles from Iraklion.

 

The station was abandoned in ’94,

presumably as a contribution to

‘the end of history’. Much of it

has been looted and vandalised and left

to weeds but some parts house an aquarium,

a dinosaur park, an animal shelter.

Now Cyprus, Greece and Israel are allied –

in part to exploit off-shore gas reserves –

there is talk the base may be re-opened.

 

Sometimes in the millennia-old ruins

of the palace – the causes of whose

unrecorded abandonment has filled

volumes of conjecture – you may believe

you can hear a peacock calling, calling

in all its finery.

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

HIMALAYAN CHARNEL

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read2.2K views

Though there were rumours for a millennium

the first officially recorded sighting

of skeletons – at more than sixteen thousand feet

around the glacial, Lake Roopkund

in Uttarukhand’s Chamoli district –

was by a border guard in 1940.

The authorities thought a company

of Japanese soldiers had frozen to death

trying to invade India from the north

via Tibet but the bones were too old.

 

There were other hypotheses. A large group –

two hundred in total – of pilgrims

and their bearers, heading to the temples

in the forested valleys of the south,

were caught in a hailstorm with no shelter,

hail ‘like cricket balls’ – a simile

befitting a cricketing nation –

that clubbed to death each man, woman and child.

 

DNA tests show most of the remains

are local, but one is from the East,

possibly Java or Japan, and fourteen

from Crete and Greece  – strayed remnants maybe

from the army of Alexander the Great?

 

The place has become popular with tourist-

trekkers, so much so the authorities

have closed off the whole area. Made

wrong-headed by the altitude, perhaps,

back-packers secreted skulls as souvenirs.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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