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POETRY

TRAVELLERS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read235 views

As we walk beside the wide estuary

we follow a wheatear as it waits for us

on the embankment of the rough causeway

then bobs and flits from stone to stone as we near,

enticing us, flashing its white rump,

which is pure white like an egret’s feathers.

 

We watch the tide beneath the low viaducts

begin to rise. On tracks Stephenson built

the London-Holyhead train crosses,

passes close to Edward’s grey castle walls.

Waders are gathering on the mudflats –

curlews, red shanks, egrets – denizens,

immigrants. This bird, which led us from its nest

among the embankment’s crevices, will

winter in Africa.

 

 

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POETRY

THE MOON’S BACKSIDE AND RELATED MATTERS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read393 views

We speak of the “world being turned upside down” –

thinking perhaps of the earth’s richest,  most

powerful country freely electing as king

a felonious buffoon – but we should think

instead of the world turned back to front

so that, when the earth is spread out

flat as a map, it is not the Greenwich

Meridian at 0 degrees longitude

at its centre but its opposite twin

at 180 degrees, the Date Line.

Then to its left is the West: all of

Australasia, all of Asia,

Africa, Europe, most of Russia,

and a piece of Greenland – and right the East:

all of the Americas, most of Greenland,

and a very small piece of Russia.

So the centre of the world is not

threaded through London but through Fiji.

 

***

 

The rockets are soaring again. Like some

nineteenth century Great Game, China,

India and the US of A

are competing in exploration

and exploitation. People are dying

on earth unnecessarily – from

malaria, hunger, pollution, shrapnel,

blast, torture – and the rockets are soaring,

and obsequious hype fills the ether.

 

***

 

Meanwhile there are plans to rename parts

of the Moon’s posterior – no more

The Sea of Moscow or The Gagarin

Crater – and the plans for the lunar site

of the Acme University

of The Solar System are well advanced

now that the founders have approved the name.

 

After much informed and good natured debate

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk  and Mark Zuckerberg

have agreed that that august institution

on the moon’s rear should be named after

a six letter combination of the

first two initials of their surnames

in descending order of personal wealth – thus

the Mubezu Campus.

 

 

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POETRY

BANALITY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.4K views

Above the music from the pub on the corner,

a bottle’s throw from the Thames Embankment,

and the noise from the eateries housed

in the arches of the railway embankment,

spaces where once there had been workshops,

if you stand still in Bank End, Southwark,

you can hear the squeal of commuter trains

crossing the river to Cannon Street station –

built on the site of a trading post

of the mediaeval Hanseatic League,

exporting wool, importing beeswax.

 

***

 

When the first Brixton Riot began

I was staying in a small hotel

just off the Embankment in Pimlico

on the opposite bank of the river.

One night, I woke to the sound of dripping.

I turned on the bedside lamp. Water

was trickling from the ceiling

through the light fitting, down the flex and the shade

onto the carpet. I went to Reception,

and woke the Night Porter. I could hear

distant sirens, and thought at first they had been

summoned for me – then imagined another’s

anxiety, and their brief comfort. I had looked

through the hotel’s glass-panelled front door

and seen fires lighting the southern sky.

 

***

 

I think of those for whom accidents are never

benign, those who live without dignity,

and those who know nothing but hardship.

This a place of angry strangers,

among cut and tailored granite and limestone,

shipped in blocks on the sea and the river

from Portland Bill and Cornwall’s Lamorna Cove.

 

***

 

Once, when I was eight and with my mother,

after we had been shopping at John Lewis

on the Finchley Road, as we entered

the nearby Finchley Road Underground

to take the tube train to Golders Green,

I noticed an ambulance parked at the kerb –

and then two ambulance men approaching us

carrying a stretcher. The body was wrapped

in a grey blanket. On the covered torso

was a bowler hat and a briefcase.

Between the body and the stretcher’s edge

there was a long, black, furled umbrella.

My mother explained what had happened, and why.

She was one who longed for oblivion –

but death came at a time of its choosing.

 

***

 

Trapped in that liminal space between present

and past, between being and remembering,

that eternal picture show, what might fix

a troublesome head, a troubled heart?

In Tate Modern – a gallery re-purposed,

in this city of money and invention,

from a disused power station on Bankside –

across its spacious mezzanine floor

a little girl is cart-wheeling. O the

banality of joy!

 

 

 

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POETRY

MERIDIANS AND PARAKEETS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.2K views

I am sitting on a bench beside the Thames

on a sunny April Saturday at Greenwich,

and watching the boatloads disembark

at Greenwich Pier. They wander through the erstwhile

Royal Naval College, and walk up the hill

to the Royal Observatory. They tread,

in its courtyard, the stainless steel strip

that marks the prime meridian which set

the clocks of a thousand shipping fleets.

I watch the river as it flows softly

past the Isle of Dogs on the opposite bank,

and the sun glint on the topless towers of

Canary Wharf’s Masters of the Universe.

 

I think of elsewhere: across the Hudson

near the Jersey shore, the view from Liberty

Island and Ellis Island of the isle

of Manhattan – its charm, its promise,

its threat – the Twin Towers still intact;

of the stone compass in the cliff-top

fortress at Sagres, the furthest south west point

of Europe, where the Mediterranean

and the North Atlantic meet, where Henry

the Navigator set his naval college,

some of whose graduates made the Slave Coast.

 

The Royal Naval College here, its elegance

and Portland Stone still pristine, was designed,

during the Restoration, by Wren,

Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh. It has become part

museum, wedding venue, grove

of academe. Mature London Plane Trees grow

in its expansive, graceful courtyard.

Rose-ringed parakeets – offspring of escaped pets

originally from India but now

naturalised through much of south east England,

and spreading westwards, and northwards – flit

their vivid green from branch to branch, their calls

squeaking like infants’ toys.

 

 

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POETRY

HOUSMAN’S BOND SLAVE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2.3K views

In ‘My Antonia’, Willa Cather’s third

novel about European pioneers

on the Great Plains, and first published in

1918, Antonia’s father,

failing at farming the prairie, longing

for his old life as a musician

in Catholic Bohemia, kills himself.

Denied his burial on consecrated ground

his wife, a bitter woman, has him interred

at the south west corner of their small plot of land,

where two tracks meet – like the old country,

where suicides were buried at a cross roads.

In time, what was unfenced wilderness marked

by stakes, and ways marked by wagon wheels, becomes

ordered farmland and levelled roads. Fenced now,

enclosed with the last of the red prairie grass,

the grave remains untouched. The roads curve round it.

 

***

 

Shortly after the publication

of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ in 1896,

Willa Cather became, as she put it,

‘Housman’s bond slave, mentally’. Whenever,

wherever she could, she promoted the work

in the magazines she edited.

She acknowledged that his poetry

made its way freely throughout her own work.

 

In 1902 she went on a tour

of Europe with a friend. First stop, more or less,

was the county of Shropshire. They visited

most of the places mentioned in the poems –

like Ludlow, Wenlock Edge, the Wrekin, and Clee –

sometimes more than once, but could find no trace

of Housman, or anyone who had ever

heard of him. The single copy of the book

in Shrewsbury’s public library was uncut.

 

Eventually, she got Housman’s address:

a boarding house in Pinner near London.

Willa went with two friends. Imagine three young,

outward-going women, passionately

convinced that Housman had written the only

verse in English from the previous decade

that would last, that it was as remarkable

technically as it was in the ‘truth

of its sentiment’. Imagine Housman,

middle-aged, lonely, forever carrying

a secret close to the surface of his heart:

his unrequited love for another man.

 

Later, Cather, in a letter to a friend,

described Housman – ‘as the most gaunt and grey

and embittered individual I know’.

She went on to say, ‘The poor man’s shoes and cuffs

and the state of the carpet in his little

hole of a study gave me a fit

of dark depression’. After they had left,

she had wept on the pavement outside the house.

 

***

 

‘…the grave, with its tall red grass that was never

mowed, was like a little island; and at

twilight, under a new moon or the clear

evening star, the dusty roads used to look

like soft grey rivers flowing past it…’

 

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POETRY

KEEPING THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2K views

‘The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE COMMON TOAD, George Orwell, 1946

 

Democratic socialist, polemicist;

novelist, poet, writer of social

and economic commentary;

Old Etonian, ex-Superintendent

of the Indian Imperial Police,

veteran of the Spanish Civil War;

Sergeant Eric Blair (aka George Orwell)

commanded a Home Guard platoon in London.

 

The platoon – which was known locally

as the ‘Foreign Legion’ because so many

of its members were refugees from

persecution in Nazi Germany

and Tzarist Russia – was one of twelve hundred

volunteer groups of part-timers mustered

nationally to delay and to frustrate

a German invasion long enough

for full-time troops to arrive and deploy.

 

Orwell, rejected from active service

because of his lungs – he would die from TB

ten years later – thought the Home Guard a

peculiarly British institution.

More than two million men being ordered

to keep an Enfield 303 rifle

and ammunition at home suggested

a complacent, almost feudal state of mind.

 

The author of ‘1984’, ‘The Road

to Wigan Pier’ and ‘Decline of the English

Murder’ had a flat in Langford Court,

Abbey Road – some thirty years too soon

to hear the Beatles sing, ‘Love is all you need.’

From the roof of his building he could observe

the fires of the Blitz in the Thames’ docks

and their adjoining terraced streets – and stray bombs

falling quite near him on Lords’ Cricket Ground

and London Zoo in The Regent’s Park,

one of many public spaces owned

by the Crown. History does not record

his being aware that a zebra

and a wild ass and its foal had escaped

during a raid. They were caught in Camden Town,

not very far from the edge of the parkland.

If he had known he might perhaps have made it

some sort of metaphor.

 

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