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Iraq

POETRY

IN DEFENCE OF WHATABOUTERY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read444 views

There have been three anniversaries of note

so far this year: the first of the invasion

of Ukraine by the Russian Federation;

the twentieth of the invasion of Iraq

by the US, UK, Australia

and Poland; the fifty fifth of the My Lai

Massacre, the murder of five hundred

and two Vietnamese men, women, children –

all civilians – by a company

of American GIs. Aggressors

seem always only too able and willing

to justify such sociopathic

behaviour with self-serving casuistry

both before and after the fact. Remember

Oradour-sur-Glane; Amritsar; the

Armenian Massacres; Wounded Knee;

Alexander the Great destroying Thebes;

the Ancient Romans’ sacking Carthage

and killing tens of thousands; and Elisha,

on his way into the city of Bethel,

being met by a large group of little children,

who mocked him because of his bald head,

so he cursed them in the name of the Lord,

and two she-bears, emerging from a nearby wood,

tore forty two of the children to pieces.

 

 

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POETRY

INCONSEQUENTIAL

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read364 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

GERTRUDE BELL AND THE TREATY OF SÈVRES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read472 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

DYSTOPIA: A WORK IN PROGRESS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read423 views

When the British and the French almost

literally drew lines in the sand

to divvy up the Ottoman Empire –

tutored by romantic, wistful Arabists

at the Quai D’Orsay and the Foreign Office –

there was nothing left for the Yazidis,

the Druze, the Kurds… It was always about oil –

and then Sunni Arabs and Zionist Jews.

It is always about oil, diamonds,

timber, gold, slaves, coal — and useful idiots.

 

*

 

Saddam hanged, Gaddafi sodomized then shot.

Being careless about what you wish for

appears to bring bandits, to make Frankenstein

monsters out of mercenaries, assassins

out of mujahideen. Better perhaps

the secret police, with pensionable jobs,

than unofficial executioners?

Better restriction than chaos, repression

than havoc? Better to live in servitude

since death ends all chance of liberty?

 

*

 

The democratic chancellories

of Europe, its communes and councils are

panders soliciting votes from racists

to prostitute the body politic.

They make virtue of prevarication

and casuistry; extol cohesion

and nationhood; plead penury –

yet erect frontiers of razor wire

and bomb far-fetched ideologies,

making accidental martyrs and migrants.

 

*

Does only a fool or knave decry

the efficacy of aerial bombing?

Do only knaves or fools advocate peace?

Do only both call, ‘Follow the money!

It’s all about oil!’? Will it always be

about oil – until the earth has become

one unrelenting desert, one vast sea

and there is no one to care about money?

Tetchy, ironic, rhetorical

questions give no shelter, change nothing.

 

*

 

It is about oil and useful innocents

seeking exile, seeking sanctuary.

They run from the bullets at the border –

anonymous children, young men, women

in labour, grandmas – or wait, patiently

for the most part, as if despair were a crime,

as if anger were a fault, in the rain

and the smoke, or, duped, drown in silence.

Theirs has become a name, whoever they are,

to conjure pity and heart break – or lies.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE LAST CALIPH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read506 views

Ataturk dissolved seven centuries
of the Sultanate and the British
cloaked-and-daggered the aging Sultan
by sea to San Remo and exile.
Ataturk made the Sultan’s middle aged
cousin, Abdülmecid II, Caliph.
He seemed to carry his descent, as it were,
from the Prophet as lightly as a Pope
from the Saviour. He liked the pomp
and the public circumstance of the role
so much Ataturk sent him packing too.

Classical composer, husband of four wives,
painter, lepidopterist, gardener,
a Victor Hugo fan and of Montaigne’s
Essays – especially perhaps ‘By
Divers Means Men Come To A Like End’ –
he went into exile on The Orient
Express en famille and lived in Paris
and Nice. ‘He may be seen strolling with a mien
of great dignity along the beach,’
wrote a foreign correspondent, ‘attired
in swimming trunks only, carrying
a large parasol.’ He died in his bed
in his house on Boulevard Suchet
as Paris was freed from the Nazis –
his beard, of which he was proud, still resplendent.
He was buried in Medina – Madinat
Al-Nabi, City of the Prophet –
as, officially, the last of the line.
It could have been worse. His seems to have been
a charmed, perhaps even charming, life –
with an enviable retirement, due,
in large part, to Ataturk’s shrewdness.

What would either of them have made of
caliphate proclamations from the deserts
of Syria and Iraq; stage-managed
beheadings broadcast worldwide; Semtex strapped
to the gut and the heart?

 

 

 

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POETRY

LABOR DAY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read430 views

I  was invited to go power boating

on the Illinois River on Labor Day.

My elderly hosts were retired.

He had been a builder, she a teacher –

caring folk looking out for a stranger.

They had Scottish ancestry, they told me,

and confessed, laughing, that they had spent

the previous night imbibing Drambuie.

We spoke warmly of the water of life.

‘But no drinking on board!’ they chorused.

Old Glory hung limply in their yard

in the soupy Mid-West September air.

 

While the wife fixed lunch in the galley,

I stood next to the husband at the wheel

while the boat bucked and slapped and dodged.

‘We’d be goners if we hit the driftwood.’

The forests on either side were pristine,

he explained. ‘There were Indians here.’

 

‘Come and get it!‘ He steered towards the bank

and a moorage. He turned to me, speaking

softly. ‘Our youngest boy, Callum, died…

in Iraq last December. Just so you know.’

 

 

 

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