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Jerusalem

POETRY

HARD QUESTIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read615 views

The incense trade route transported frankincense

and myrrh, saplings as well as resin,

aromatic and medicinal,

from what is now part of the Yemen

northwards along the Red Sea coast

and then north east across the Negev

to the port of Gaza and the Great Sea.

It was a twice yearly sixth month journey

for a millennium and a half.

As empires shifted the trade moved elsewhere.

 

***

 

The fabled Queen of Sheba and her

fabulous entourage of courtiers

and of camel trains carrying gold,

and spices, and precious stones,

followed most of the route on her way

to Jerusalem to surprise Solomon

in his royal citadel. She disbelieved

the tales she had heard about the king’s wisdom

and his wealth, and intended to ‘prove him

with hard questions’. He answered so well

that she gave him all of the gifts she had brought.

‘And she said to the king…the half was not told me’.

Perhaps she had just found out about his

‘seven hundred wives…three hundred concubines’.

 

***

 

Dispensing some self-righteous, PR version

of King Solomon’s ‘judgement and justice’,

and each worth considerably more than

any king’s bounty, a ballistic missile

will take ten minutes or so from the Yemen

to Israel and vice versa. Though empires shift,

and death smells of TNT and rocket fuel,

each apocalypse comes with smoke and fire,

and no answers.

 

 

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POETRY

SATANS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read5.1K views

Is there some primate imperative, some

genetic human want, need, reverence for

so-called strong leaders, those masters of

othering, destroyers of order,

adepts in venality and stupidity,

casual slaughterers of innocence?

 

Israel attacks Iran on a pretext from the

loan library of Pretexts – more or less

the same pretext Alexander the Great

borrowed when he burned Persepolis,

(city of the Persians). Iran borrows

from the library of Virility

and attacks Israel – the same library the Crusaders used

when they captured Jerusalem and slaughtered

Jews and Muslims, men, women, and children.

 

And the world’s self-appointed Policeman –

in hock to Christian Evangelists

and Fossil Fuel Companies and the concept

of Full Spectrum Dominance – plays his trump card,

a TV series entitled THE END

OF DAYS, with seven full length episodes:

‘Iraq’, ‘Libya’, ‘Somalia’, ‘Sudan’,

‘Lebanon’, ‘Syria’, ‘Iran’; the seven

countries of the apocalypse; repeat.

 

Opportunists and fanatics, rich boys

and malignant narcissists, greedy shits

and unhinged rhetoricians, sadists

and chaps with things to prove are, it seems,

like the poor, always to be with us

to the very end of history.

 

 

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POETRY

AND THE STARS

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

One of the few survivors of the attack

on a Gaza City refuge – that had once

been a school – is a five-year-old girl,

who walks alone through the burning building.

Her name is Waad. Most of her family

have perished, including her mother.

Traumatised she speaks softly: ‘I love Mama

as big as the sky and the earth – and the stars.’

She is surrounded by concrete rubble,

domestic detritus, and the unfound dead.

 

An hour or so’s drive away, a horde of

well-fed men is striding through the narrow streets

of old Jerusalem chanting ‘Death

to the Arabs!’ Though the Arabic

and Hebrew for ‘death’ and ‘love’ have the same

Semitic roots, the child and the chanting mob

seem galaxies apart.

 

 

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POETRY

SPEAKING OF STONES

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments2 min read2.8K 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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POETRY

PROPHETS

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

The evangelist – spiritual aide-de-camp

to Old Glory’s Commanders-in-Chief,

and nostrum-monger of eternal life –

in white shirt, black shoes, socks, trousers, the Good Book

open in his hands, sits astride a donkey

near the Garden of Gethsemane

on Mount Olive. Below him on Temple Mount,

in noonday brightness, is the Dome of the Rock

and the Al-Aksa Mosque and, out of sight,

the Western Wall. He looks at the camera

as one who might say, ‘Behold! When the Jews

hold Jerusalem heaven will open.

Jesus will return on a white horse!’

The donkey’s Arab minder – in slightly

shabby casual wear – steadies the beast

by placing his right arm on its hindquarters.

The goad, which he holds in his left hand,

rests on the creature’s belly. His wrist watch

is exposed. We can almost tell the time.

He smiles or leers at the camera

as if to say, ‘Behold!’

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE FALL OF EUROPE

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

Lucheni had waited all day in the pines

above the lake. When she passed, he begged.

Her equerry dismissed him. As always,

self-absorbed, she saw nothing: an anarchist

with a grand and personal design.

On the quayside at Geneva, a week

later, Lucheni, the labourer,

stabbed Elizabeth, Empress of Austria,

with a homemade knife. Her husband foresaw,

like her assassin, anarchy: armies

entrenching in Bohemia; riders

galloping from Buda; at the Hofburg,

Jews and republicans!

 

The Empress and her only son discovered

the twentieth century. Rudolf

was cavalry, and a liberal. ‘ After

a long period of sickness,’ he wrote,

‘a wholly new Europe will arise

and bloom.’ Father misunderstood him.

At Mayerling, Rudolf shot Marie Vetsera

and then himself. Elizabeth travelled

from grief or disillusion: obsessive,

dilettante, naive and beautiful.

They died before their time, believing

their neuroses symptoms of the age, the world’s

contours shaped like their hearts.

 

On Corfu, she built The Achillean,

a kitsch imitation of the attic.

She peopled the palace’s emptiness

with statues of soldiers and poets –

like Heine, her favourite. “Another

subversive Jew!” the Emperor observed.

‘Ich hatte einst ein schones Vaterland.’

The Dying Achilles, nude except for

his helmet, was turned to face the north – Berlin

Vienna, Sarajevo. After

her death, the Kaiser bought the palace,

sold off Heine and replaced her Achilles

with his, The Victorious.

 

Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria,

King of Jerusalem, Duke of Auschwitz,

wore, on his wedding night, dress uniform.

He signed his letters to Elizabeth,

‘Your lonely manikin.’ After he had read

the telegram informing him of her death,

“No one knows,” he said, “how much we loved

each other.” ‘Es traumte mir von einer

Sommernacht.’ Across the darkening straits,

lamps are lit on the Balkan mainland.

On the empty terrace, a march or perhaps

a waltz wheezes from the orchestrion.

Fireflies blink with passion.

 

 

Note: The poem was first published on the site in May 2010.

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