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Ireland

POETRY

ALL OF IRELAND’S AMBIGUOUS AIRS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

For Sarah Selzer



The arithmetic suggests you might have been

conceived on the night ferry to Dublin.

That, with a drive across the republic

in August, and a week of spuds and Guinness,

of Sweet Afton’s and of Passing Clouds,

of fuchsias, escaped from some gentry’s garden,

purpling wild and red down narrow lanes

where family men fought a ragged war,

rocks at Hell’s Mouth, white and bleached as bones,

the lullaby lapping of Bantry Bay,

and sailing home across a violent sea

to our newly decorated, newly

furnished south-facing flat at the top

of an old house almost as tall as its trees,

may explain your sureness with words and people,

with colours, and textures, and keepsakes,

your sense of irony, of justice,

of the absurd, and your certainty

that what matters most is love and kindness.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SERMON ON THE MOUNT

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

The plaque has been placed high onto the front wall

of a terraced house in the street next to ours –

and is, in effect, a terracotta tile,

roughly a foot-and-a half by a foot,

with a raised border, and lettering

and numerals probably executed

by a gravestone mason, who maybe lived there.

The date inscribed is 1872 –

the words, first in English and then in Welsh,

‘Blessed are the meek. Matthew V.v’.

 

When the railways came in the 1850s

bringing the London-Holyhead line,

the station became an important one.

Chester was a garrison city,

and Ireland always needed pacifying.

Where we live now was developed

to house the families of working class

skilled men and lower middle class clerks

in exclusively rented accommodation,

which makes the plaque a surprise: not its faith,

nor its grave taste, nor its erudition –

the railway junction attracted migrants

over the border from the poverty

of North East Wales – but that mere tenants

should have had the courage to declare their right

to a place in the world. That, on reflection,

was perhaps the point of the Beatitudes,

and whoever it was who crafted them.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE MERMAID’S PURSE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.9K views

For Evie Chapman

 

She fetches me a mermaid’s purse she has found

among the seaweed where the sand

meets the mound of pebbles the waves have built

and rebuilt over the centuries.

The small black pouch, with tendrils like broken straps

and firm as dried leather, is an empty

egg case, from which a shark or a ray hatched

on the seabed, probably between here

and Ireland. Tides detached and chance brought

this empty womb, wafted by the currents

like a wrecked black sail, or a lost coracle.

 

Children in bright colours scramble on the mound,

their calls like seabirds lifted on the air.

Mer-people are amongst us, their fishy flanks

invisible. From the future’s gritty depths

she fetches me another gift, a white stone,

large enough to need two carrying hands –

an amalgam of crustaceans calcified,

preserved aeons ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

2019

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2.7K views

‘O what fine thought we had because we thought

That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.’

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN, W.B. Yeats

 

Where the four main thoroughfares of our erstwhile

Roman city meet, a many-legged dragon,

in vivid gold and red, curved and reared, to gongs,

drums, fire crackers on a February day.

Dancers whirled long white ribbons, a whorl

of streamers like a wild, wispy sky.

This was the year of the omnivorous Pig,

saturninely devouring its own children.

Next is the Rat, ubiquitous, cunning –

happy for self-harming fools, tax-dodging knaves.

 

 

***

 

Some of the elected representatives

of the people turned their tailored backs

on ‘The Ode to Joy’ – Alle Menschen

werden Brüder – that song of protest,

that anthem of jubilant community.

Two hundred years ago was Peterloo,

one hundred Amritsar. Injustice

is never forgotten – and good sense

may prevail. The parochial rhetoric

of violent, bitter men may choke them,

in their locked courts and gated houses!

The wisdom of the crowd, not its ineptness,

its ignorance, its folly may save us:

reform our lottery democracy,

unite Ireland, free Scotland, make Wales

autonomous, England a federation!

 

***

 

The new decade is close. You can hear

its jostling caravanserai of guile

and deceit; its proxy civil wars; its

alchemy of assertions made truths,

lies transmogrified into speculations,

hatreds tempered into virtues, histories

traduced, honesty persecuted.

But listen!  There, far off, is a mustering

of rustling drums, the subtle summonings

of gongs. Let chaos be our only hope,

and the triumph of youth!

 

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POETRY

A WINNING HAND

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

We met on the first working day of the week;

married, five years later, on a Saturday;

and sailed for Ireland on the Sunday.

This Monday marks fifty two years of mostly

wedded bliss; occasional toilsome woe;

loving; giving; hard work; grace – a pack of cards

without, for the most part, the jangling jokers.

 

Out of the grassy plains, along the Silk Road

from Samarkand, came the colours of

anarchy, of power and passion; came

the four corners of the world, its seasons,

its elements; came the months of the moon.

 

Partially obscured by damp, bronzed leaves,

there, one winter Sunday before we met,

discarded on a path of a public park

was the Queen of Hearts, blithe and propitious.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

GOLDEN

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.8K views

As luck would have it, we were married this day

exactly half a century ago.

We holiday with our small family

to avoid the inevitable party

and announce our golden wedding to friends

via Facebook – and receive some humbling

encouragements that speak not simply

of being there like pebbles as the tide

ebbs and flows but of inspiration.

 

We chose to honeymoon by Bantry Bay.

Ireland spoke of mystery and romance –

to us ignorant of its privations.

As we drove through the town that August Sunday,

the sun lowering over the Atlantic,

some church festival was finishing.

A wedding guest had hidden confetti

in our suitcase so, as you unpacked our clothes

for the first time, gaudy paper disks fluttered

over the bed beneath The Sacred Heart.

Our week was ended with upset stomachs.

We had had lunch – potatoes, carrots, bacon –

in a dark panelled restaurant in Cork,

surrounded by unsmiling nuns and priests.

We were infidels in Calvary land.

 

On the return ferry, to save money,

we spent the night in armchairs in the bar.

Before midnight a gale blew up that rolled us

forty five degrees starboard to port and back.

We could see ships nearby in Liverpool Bay

bucking as in a cartoon of a tempest.

Behind the bar’s locked grills, glasses and bottles

shattered. Bench seats along the saloon’s sides

broke free and two lines of strangers grinning

with fear briefly curtsied to each other.

 

‘Strange to be there, beginning something new,’

I wrote that autumn. ‘Strange to go there,

hoping for what might come.’ The narrow fields

and lanes seemed untouched since the Great Hunger –

yet the dry stone walls were festooned for miles

with wild fuchsia and honeysuckle. Now

it seems as if we had known that we would learn there

how to weather sickness, storms – and bask in joy.

 

 

 

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