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innocent

POETRY

POW CAMP 57…

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read352 views

…was built on downland beside the golf course

and below detached houses in their own grounds

to house Italians from North Africa

and then, post war, Germans for ‘re-education’,

and, finally, before demolition in

the late ‘50s, homeless British families.

 

A kestrel hovers above the cow parsley.

It stoops, as always unexpectedly,

then rises with a field mouse in its talons

and flies to an oak tree to feed and rest.

In the distance are the towers of Woking

and beyond, in haze, the metropolis.

 

Our granddaughter is oblivious,

scooting on the small, empty car park –

too young and innocent for epiphanies.

 

 

 

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POETRY

AN ABSENCE OF STARLINGS

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read681 views

‘My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.’

Meditations In Time Of Civil War, W.B. Yeats

 

Each year, there would be two nests –

in the eaves at opposite corners

of our square house. We would hear them,

scratching in the gutters – and Danny,

the window cleaner, an ‘affable irregular’

of the black economy, at the door for his money,

would report on their progress

through the spring and the summer –

and remark on the bees floating in the rhododendron

by the porch. “They’re light with honey,” he would say,

“light with honey.”

 

This year, though there are still bees, for the first year in nearly

forty years there is an absence of starlings,

not a one. I remember long dead, street-wise, innocent Danny,

who liked his drink, and whose ladders were stolen

twice. I remember the teeming, imperious,

cacophonous roosts of starlings that choired

the big city nights, high in the dark.

I think of the well-lit streets – greedy,

internecine.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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