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Kiev

POETRY

ASYLUM SEEKER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2K views

i.m. Samuel Selzer

 

He was never sure if it had been a joke

when the police arrested him for being,

he learned later, Jack the Ripper,

even though the last murder had been

a dozen years before, and he himself

had been eight and far away – or just

a lesson for yet another alien

wandering Whitechapel as if he had

a right to be lost in a pea souper.

 

Fresh from the Hamburg boat docked at Tilbury,

with no understanding of English

or the Roman alphabet, astray

from his equally ignorant, naive

travelling companions – oldest sons

escaping the twenty year conscription

into the Tzar’s army, all believing

they had arrived at last in Manhattan –

he was ‘sprung’ from his cell in the early hours

by the Jewish Board of Guardians.

 

A wry, resilient man, weathering

bankruptcy, his son’s death, his wife’s,

he always told the tale with humour –

another greener mislaid in the fog.

‘In Kiev if a policeman walks towards you,’

he told me, ‘you step in the gutter!

Better a night in the Leman Street lock-up

at eighteen than a lifetime of fear!’

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

CODA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

In a black cab on our way to the ballet –

‘The Red Shoes’ at Sadler’s Wells – we passed

the munificence of St Pancras Station

that dominates the six lane highway

and then the removed magnificence

of King’s Cross set far back from the road,

and I was reminded of some of Moscow’s

imitative terminals, and I thought

how a railway terminus is like

a proscenium arch and the track

inevitable like a plot unfolding.

Terminus was the god of boundaries,

the guarantor of happy ends, as it were.

And Moscow’s land locked dénouements came to mind:

Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, Ekaterinburg.

 

For islanders the world supra mare

is almost abstract, fictive, the notion

that the end of land might be days away

impossible to contemplate – like

the stage gone dark, the dancing stopped.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE RULES OF THE GAME

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.7K views

I had my first hair cut when I was three.

(I had been tricked, bamboozled, farfirt).

My grandpa took me to his barber’s –

redolent with banter and tobacco smoke –

near the junction of Cricklewood Lane

and Finchley Road. It was frequented

by his card playing cronies. I watched him

have his hair trimmed and some strands combed over.

I was invited to try the high chair

but, no sooner there, I was begowned

and the scissors flashed. ‘Fetch a policeman!’

he always claimed I called out. I imagine

a shop full of Jewish refugees laughed

uneasily at my accidental vits.

 

He smoked Craven A in an ebony

cigarette holder, drank tea from a glass

with a silver plated handle and snacked

on Rakusen’s matzos coated with

Colman’s French Mustard. When I was eight

he taught me to shuffle a deck of cards,

perfumed with nicotine, from hand to hand

then thumbs and forefingers like a croupier.

He taught me Gin Rummy where the twos

of any suit are also deuces and wild

like the jokers. We could choose whether aces

were high or low. I liked the black cards best.

 

When we were playing he would sometimes pause

to tell me stories: of Kiev; his escape

from Russia; my father; my grandmother.

We continued to play well into my teens.

There were questions I did not know how to ask

and ones then I simply did not know to ask.

I pass the tiny tales on like pieces

of a mosaic. ‘Remember’, he said,

‘for patience whichever way you shuffle

first the jokers remove!’

 

 

Note: first published 2016.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE RULES OF THE GAME

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.7K views

I had my first hair cut when I was three.

(I had been tricked, bamboozled, farfirt).

My grandpa took me to his barber’s –

redolent with banter and tobacco smoke –

near the junction of Cricklewood Lane

and Finchley Road. It was frequented

by his card playing cronies. I watched him

have his hair trimmed and some strands combed over.

I was invited to try the high chair

but, no sooner there, I was begowned

and the scissors flashed. ‘Fetch a policeman!’

he always claimed I called out. I imagine

a shop full of Jewish refugees laughed

uneasily at my accidental vits.

 

He smoked Craven A in an ebony

cigarette holder, drank tea from a glass

with a silver plated handle and snacked

on Rakusen’s matzos coated with

Colman’s French Mustard. When I was eight

he taught me to shuffle a deck of cards,

perfumed with nicotine, from hand to hand

then thumbs and forefingers like a croupier.

He taught me Gin Rummy where the twos

of any suit are also deuces and wild

like the jokers. We could choose whether aces

were high or low. I liked the black cards best.

 

When we were playing he would sometimes pause

to tell me stories: of Kiev; his escape

from Russia; my father; my grandmother.

We continued to play well into my teens.

There were questions I did not know how to ask

and ones then I simply did not know to ask.

I pass the tiny tales on like pieces

of a mosaic. ‘Remember’, he said,

‘for patience whichever way you shuffle

first the jokers remove!’

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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