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Hitler

POETRY

INCONSEQUENTIAL

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

A long section of the grassy bank beside

the ornamental lake is roped-off –

a pair of Canada Geese is nesting,

the first in the history of the Park

with its long-serving Coots and Mallards.

We sit on a bench and contemplate the geese –

almost as big as Mute Swans; adept

colonisers, considered still, after

three hundred years, non-native; this chance pair

perhaps blown off course between raucous lagoons.

 

We are distracted by raised voices

from the opposite bank – three picnickers

on a rug in the April sunshine,

a young woman and perhaps her parents.

Between the murmur of the older woman’s

responses and the man’s rumblings, we hear

occasional words from the impassioned

young woman: ‘…moral compass…out of control…

no time limit…crimes against humanity…

Iraq…Afghanistan…Northern Ireland!!…’

 

At our feet an Ivy Bee – a much newer

immigrant than the geese, landing where Hitler

and Napoleon were expected,

and moving a little further north

year by year – is making a nest in the bank.

Finished it disappears into the earth,

leaving a perfectly circular mound

of grains of sandy soil – a solitary,

relentless labourer, a bee for our times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

HINDSIGHT

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

From Moscow to London, Stockholm to Venice

the world froze at 10, 12, 15 below

for three months. Wine froze in bottles, cows in byres,

and wolves came down to villages scavenging.

Tree trunks shattered. Church bells once rung fractured.

Travellers crossed the Baltic on horse-back,

skaters glided under the Rialto.

 

The War of Spanish Succession was paused

for more clement weather – and regiments

of Swedish soldiers died in Russian blizzards,

ceding victory in the Great Northern War

to Peter the Great almost by default.

(Both Napoleon and Hitler ignored

that hard lesson about Russian winters).

 

Climatologists cannot agree

on what caused the Great Frost: the prolonged absence

of sunspots, perhaps, or volcanic ash

from recent eruptions, Vesuvius,

Santorini. Trade stopped. Hundreds of thousands

perished in a flu pandemic, or starved

to death. Louis XIV ordered bread

be given to the poor. Even the Sun King,

at his new palace in Versailles, felt obliged

to try to save the lives of mere strangers.

 

***

 

In The Gulag Archipelago’s Preface

Solzhenitsyn quotes a peasant proverb:

‘Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.

Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes’.

 

He opens the Preface with an anecdote,

a story he encountered in a magazine.

Political prisoners, from one

of the many Kolyma labour camps

in the Siberian tundra, by chance

dug up a frozen subterranean stream,

with fish preserved in motion for tens

of millennia. The prisoners

broke the ice, ate the fish.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

OF VANITY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.6K views

‘…a very stable genius…’

DONALD J. TRUMP, Tweet 6.1.18.

 

One of the prints hanging in my grandmother’s

bedroom was Waterhouse’s ‘Echo

and Narcissus’. In a bosky, rather

English landscape, Narcissus and Echo –

before he became a flower and she a sound –

lie and sit respectively: she entranced with him,

and he with himself in the slow brook.

 

As a boy I thought it a picture

of a good looking chap and a pretty girl

with water and lilies, that might have featured

in one of Busby Berkeley’s productions,

which flickered across our nine inch telly.

 

Though most of the people I have met since then

have been angels in waiting it would have been

helpful, I know now, for some exegesis

of the painting, to see beneath the masks

of the few egomaniacs I have known,

uncover immediately their seeming charms,

their rhetoric of self-righteous blame,

their instant shifts into public self-pity

and paranoia, their betrayal of friends,

their creation of their very own doomsdays.

 

                                    ***

 

The narcissist’s narcissist, Adolf Hitler,

echoing Horace to an extent

consciously or not, opined the year

Rommel was defeated and Stalingrad

relieved, “Wars are all very well. Art lasts.”

 

By the time he was Chancellor there were

so many ‘Village with Mountain View’, ‘Lake

with Mountain View’ and ‘Village and Lake

with Mountain View’ signed Adolf Hitler

and on sale as the genuine article,

that the artist decided it was time

for a definitive catalogue. Agents

were dispatched across Deutschland and Österreich

to purchase all paintings attributed

to him. Sadly, for posterity,

the artist was not able to determine

fake genius from true.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ACHILLES’ HEELS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

On the short strand where the Red Wharf Bay Sailing

and Water Sports Club has its clubhouse,

the salvaged HMS Thetis was grounded

the day Chamberlain declared war on Hitler.

 

The last human remains were slow marched,

with muffled drums, up the narrow, high banked lane.

For want of an escape drill and a pinhole

ninety nine men had died from carbon monoxide.

 

Raging Achilles, scion of the Greeks,

prince of the Myrmidons, slayer of Hector,

was son to Thetis, a nymph of the sea.

 

The First Lord took no blame, kept secret the

misapplied drop of enamel paint,

the panic – and compensated no one.

 

With muffled drums up the straitened lane

they bore the dead that sunny Sunday –

before the beaches were edged with tank traps,

the coasts sealed with barbed wire.

 

 

 

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POETRY

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

‘Half winged-half imprisoned, this is man!’
PEDAGOGICAL SKETCHBOOKS, Paul Klee, 1925

 

Cruising from Westminster to Greenwich, we passed
Tate Modern, the old Bankside power station –
art as regeneration. The current show
was ‘Paul Klee – Making Visible’. “Making
a fool of himself, more like!” called the captain
over the tannoy. There was much laughter
and some applause. The 02 Arena
and the Thames Barrier came into view –
two works of abstract art as engineering.
In the Royal Hospital’s Painted Hall
are Thornhill’s baroque maritime murals –
representational art as décor
and establishment propaganda.

On the return trip, a different captain
made the same remark – to the same effect.
Klee and his peers had been many decades
dead and were, seemingly, still a threat –
despite the sponsor, EY – Ernst & Young –
trusted global accountants and auditors!

Klee catalogued his work precisely.
‘Making Visible’ followed his schema.
In the ‘20s room, I studied his ‘Wohin?’ –
‘Where to?’ – oil on paper, A4 more or less –
a stylised landscape of seven trees –
straight trunks, leaves and branches circular,
six deep green, paint richly daubed, the seventh
a discreet orange – and varicoloured,
irregular fields, no lanes, paths – the title
painted in as part of the picture.

I had seen the work before: exhibited
in Chicago’s Art Institute, built
as part of the 1893 World Fair –
architectural art as marketing.
The exhibition was a reprise –
a sort of victory roll – of the Nazi’s
‘Entarte Kunst’ – ‘Degenerate Art’,
mastered by Goebbels, opened by Hitler
in ’37 in Munich’s Chamber
of Visual Arts. In addition
to Klee’s, there were works by Chagall, Grosz,
Kandinsky, Kokoscha, Mondrian et al –
snatched from the public galleries of the Reich.
One might have expected the exhibition
to have been followed by the public
immolation of the works of art,
like the burning of books in ’33.
Some disappeared as Europe broke apart.
Many, like ‘Wohin?’, travelled safely
abroad. Money makes the art go round.

In ’33, vilified by the Nazis,
he left Germany and returned to Bern.
His was, as he put it, ‘a thinking eye’,
seeing truly the scope and the nature of things;
Picasso’s ‘master of colour’; versatile
in his use of materials; prolific.
In ’36, he was diagnosed
with scleroderma, an incurable
degenerative disease, that affects
motor skills. He died the month the Werhmacht
took Paris. He painted to the end.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CIVIL WARS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

After the horsemen and the slaves, before
the Stalins and the Hitlers, were the skilful
cities – cosmopolitan, pragmatic,
loud and solemn with towers, spires, domes.

There are some who would reprise a fictive past,
revert from countries of convenience
to imaginary nations, ignore
the corrupting legacy of empire,
the corrupted remittance of colonies,
oil trumping Crusades and martyrdom.

Europe could break like a slate across old
fault lines – a slate smudged with alphabets.
Europe could rub out its history.

There are swastikas in Brick Lane and Berlin,
lampooning in Paris and Soho.
When liberty is assassinated,
freedom is curbed by the rationale
of abhorrence, the politics of outrage –
Jews, Christians, Muslims, the conflicted peoples
of The Book confounded. So, whose Europe?

The cities are filled still with parks and squares.
Storks, pigeons, starlings roost above music
and commerce. After the horsemen and the slaves…

 

 

 

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