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POETRY

PLANETARY ALIGNMENTS

David Selzer By David Selzer8 Comments2 min read1.3K views

Against a greyish backdrop of an entire

block of concrete apartments in Gaza –

hapazardly demolished by aerial

and/or artillery and/or tank

bombardments – a photograph in Haaretz

shows a group of ten female soldiers

in olive green posing relaxedly

for a selfie. I do not know their names.

They are somebody’s daughters, who, no doubt,

would consider themselves and probably are

generally decent, and well meaning.

 

In another Haaretz photograph,

about an hour and half away by car – the time

it would take me to drive from here to Blackpool –

is a ten year old West Bank boy called Amro,

a name which means ‘To Live a Long Time’.

He has a serious look on his face

as he poses for the camera.

He is holding up a flannelgraph version

of the Solar System, which he has made.

 

I do not know what has become of the young women

posing like tourists among the ruins.

 

Sitting on the family car’s front seat

with his dad and his seven year old brother,

Amro – for no apparent reason, by design

or accident – was shot in the head,

and died. The bullet was fired by a young man

in a purpose-built concrete watch tower.

 

 

Note: Here are the links to the two photographs described in the poem and published in Haaretz on 20.3.24 & 16.3.24 respectively –

 

https://img.haarets.co.il/bs/0000018e-5d2a-d4b2-afcf-dfbe35cd0001/83/0a/07a1ddba4a94a9bc052eaacac8e1/033102.jpg?height=488&width=840

 

https://img.haarets.co.il/bs/0000018e-4466-d1ed-a7ef-55772e9c0000/ea/b3/bca7876c40a1a4f00e71ffc9afd3/55974219.JPG?height=960&width=960

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SPEAKING OF STONES

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments2 min read1.3K views

‘For Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation: they shall drive out Ashdod at the noon day, and Ekron shall be rooted up.’ ZEPHANIAH 2.4

‘Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”’ INVISIBLE CITIES, Italo Calvini

 

When they were shown the abandoned houses,

with the half-eaten food on the table,

and the children’s toys scattered as if in haste,

the upended chair, broken glass, blood smeared,

they immediately remembered their parents’ tales

of what it was like at times in the old country,

and then, it seems, immediately forgot.

 

***

 

After many, many decades he returned,

to his village in the forest, expecting

to find all the houses razed, and the ruins

blackened with fire, instead they seemed pristine,

and each of them inhabited, including

his family’s. When he explained haltingly

to a passer-by – the language returning

the more he spoke – who he was, and why

he had returned, the villager went quickly

from house to house, rousing the inhabitants.

They chased him into the forest, throwing clods,

shouting abuse he remembered so well.

 

***

 

She pretended to be a stranger, strolling

past the gates to the courtyard of the house,

studying a tourist map. The wrought iron gates

had had metal sheets welded to them

to hide the courtyard – and the bougainvillea

had been ripped from the top of the high wall

and replaced with razor wire. There was CCTV

at each vantage point of the property.

A little girl suddenly appeared

at a window on the third floor, where

the bedrooms used to be, and waved. She waved back,

and whispered, “You are standing where I once stood”.

 

***

 

The apartment block next to the beach road

is only partially collapsed. Perhaps

the next bombardment will finish the job.

Its leaning white walls and glassless windows

are like a dystopian cenotaph.

A flat-bed cart – its many passengers

huddled as if in rain – passes, pulled

by a blinkered donkey. The Phoenician sea

breaks on the crowded beach. The sand between

the road and the water line is covered

by a disparate community

of trampled plastic tents.

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

LOOK ON MY WORKS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read642 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

DOUBLETHINK

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read533 views

‘Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room in the country for two peoples… the only solution [after World War II ends] is a Land of Israel…without Arabs…’ Yosef Weitz, 1940.

At first glance the photo only seems to show

three men standing side by side on a slope

somewhere in Palestine. They are dressed

like professional men, Americans

or Europeans. The one in the middle

holds a map of some sort in his left hand,

and points at something in the distance

with his right. He is Yosef Weitz, Director,

Land and Afforestation Department,

Jewish National Fund. (An immigrant

from Tzarist Russia, a refugee

from pogroms, he worked on the land, something

Jews were forbidden to do in The Pale.

A dogmatic autodidact his vision

was for Eretz Israel to be a country

of forests – perhaps, unconsciously,

like the forested hills of his birthplace).

On closer inspection there are two others

in the photograph: a woman almost

totally obscured by Weitz, except

for the hem of her long skirt and the top

of her hijab, and a man – obscured

almost totally by one of Weitz’s

colleagues but for his keffiyeh.

The Arab stands behind Weitz, and to his left.

Weitz is leaning back as if it is to

the Arab he is pointing out whatever

he has seen. The Arab also holds the map.

Maybe he is trying to be helpful or

maybe the land is his.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

‘CHILDREN PLAYING ON OMAHA BEACH’: David Seymour

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read454 views

The war is two years over. The tide is out,

and the beach clear of detritus except

for part of an upended landing stage,

like a leviathan’s jaw, in a pool.

Beside it there are four small children,

who are playing the serious, absorbing games

the very young play with wet, fugitive sand.

The photographer, whose parents were murdered

by the Nazis, was killed by machine gun fire

near the Suez Canal. He photographed

Ingrid Bergman with a dove, and Picasso

with ‘Guernica’; covered the Spanish

Civil War, and the founding of Israel.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE NAKBA

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read483 views

‘…mourning and sorrow shall end,
when I return to Jerusalem…’

Mediaeval Jewish Prayer

 

‘We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.’

Mahmoud Darwish

 

On a land mass that is the size of landlocked

Rutland, the smallest county in England,

Gaza, the Earth’s third most populated

polity, has two small rivers  and a hill.

Its city, four thousand years ago,

was the site of a Pharaonic fortress.

 

Though the Jordan is inaccessible,

nowhere in the Strip is more than eight miles

from sandy beaches and the ‘Great Sea’,

the dark blue ‘Sea of the Philistines’.

 

During the so-called Suez Crisis,

as the invading Israeli infantry

reached the outskirts of Gaza City,

refugees from the Nakba – ‘catastrophe’,

‘disgrace’ – left their faded British Army tents

and clapped, thinking the young soldiers had come

to take them all back home.

 

 

 

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