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POETRY

ORGANISED CRIMES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.4K views

I watched the TV parade of affluent

(and mostly public school) chancers, liars,

fantasists, hypocrites, law-breakers

vie to top each other’s warmed-up clichés

and self-serving platitudes. The social

and economic future dystopia most

seemed to desire would, they assured us,

bring out the British best in all of us,

just like the Blitz. I thought of bomb-razed

building lots in major cities still empty –

and a tale a cabby told me years ago,

taxiing me from the railway station.

 

As he dropped me off he looked at the house.

He asked if it had a cellar, with a door

opening onto the back garden. I nodded.

He and his mum, he said, had joined a silent

and lengthy queue to buy black market sugar.

‘A doctor lived here then, ran a racket

with the lad that worked at the grocer’s.

The lad did time. The medic got off scot-free.’

 

I did some research, worked out the dates.

Here, in this place of light we have made our home,

all those ordinary folk committed crimes

like common recidivists – while London

was bombed, and Coventry, and Liverpool,

and the BBC broadcast Churchill’s speeches

of carefully crafted rhetoric.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE FIVE GIANTS

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.1K views

Walking down Renshaw Street from ‘Rumpelstiltskin’

at the Unity then along Bold Street,

with its strolling crowds and varied eateries,

to Central Station, thinking of spinning gold

from straw, we pass beggars in doorways.

‘What are they doing?’ our granddaughter asks.

We explain. ‘Why don’t they get jobs?’ We explain.

 

My mother would tell me how, when she moved

to London before the war to be a nurse,

she was appalled by the rough sleepers

on the benches along the Thames Embankment.

In the depressed provinces presumably

there were enough workhouses to hide them.

There being no workhouses under Thatcher

and too few shelters they were everywhere

from twilight onwards, androgynous bundles

in the world’s fifth largest economy.

Now they have returned exactly like

their forebears in the largest empire since Rome’s.

They are dragon’s teeth. Where is our shame, our fear?

 

The gusts of wind, that fling the scattered rain

against the panes and flail the apple tree –

which jerks as if a frantic, shaken doll –

are lowing in the chimney like an owl.

I draw the blinds as the twilight goes,

switch on the laptop and begin to write,

thinking of those who are without – homeless,

hungry, thirsty – no more than a mile

let alone a continent away.

 

Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, Idleness –

Beveridge’s gargantua – are alive,

well, and stalking in our city centres,

in run down estates with abandoned gardens,

in bed-and-breakfasts in cul-de-sac towns

with shut-up shops and rusting factories.

Spin as we may, stamp as we might, marvels

and wonders outsmart facts. ‘The needy

and the poor have only themselves to blame,’

say the sassy and the rich. Our consciences

have fallen among thieves.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE VICISSITUDES OF HISTORY

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

i.m. Clara Eisenberg

Her maiden surname was Eisenberg, ‘iron

mountain’, one that had been chosen for them

from the Imperial list. I was often

uneasy, unsure in her presence.

She hardly ever smiled. I realise now

because I looked so like her son, my father.

She died, from kidney failure, when I was nine.

 

On the mantelpiece in our dining room

is a pair of figurines – faux Meissen –

brought in her parents’ wooden suitcase, wrapped

in linen, journeying from Leopoldstat,

Vienna, to Whitechapel, London.

 

She had a hat shop in Hendon. Sometimes,

when my mother helped out, I was allowed

to look into the deep drawers where the hats,

like exotic plants, lay on tissue paper –

but when the shop was full of customers

I stayed in the workroom. There were lengths of felt,

rolls of ribbon, a barred sash window

and a double burner that smelled of gas.

The two shop girls would make a fuss of me.

 

Each figurine has a young man and woman

dressed and posed as if just emerging

from Marie Antoinette’s rustic retreat

at Versailles, and mirrored in the matching

figurine. Before my time the head

of one of the swains has been glued back on

and the maids have lost a hand apiece

but their expressions of bucolic delight

have remain undiminished whatever

the vicissitudes of history.

 

While Grandpa did his ARP duty

back east at the Fire Station in Cable Street,

Nanny went to the spiritualist church

in Hendon. The Medium passed messages:

her soldier son was in pain no more;

she would see and hold him once again

forever in the light beyond. The matter

was off limits in the one bedroom flat.

 

She made cream cheese in a muslin bag

she hung from the cold tap in the kitchen

to make it set. The whey would drip through the night,

minute by minute, hour after hour.

When she made apple strudel the flat

was aromatic with cinnamon.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A VIEW FROM THE CASTLE

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

It is not the winter-grey Danube flowing –

hundreds of feet below – fast to Budapest,

nor the suspension bridge – with its high rise

circular restaurant – commemorating

the failed uprising against the Nazis,

nor the outline of the Vienna Alps

fifty miles away, nor the wind turbines

covering the plain between, but the concrete

Soviet era apartment blocks

now painted white and some in pastel shades

that first catch the eye from this stronghold

on a rocky hill far above the town

on the second day of 2018.

This must be Europe’s centre: liberated,

Catholic, polyglot; in Magyar,

German, Slovak; Pozsonyi Vár,

Pressburger Schloss, Bratislavsky Hrad.

 

As we descend the narrow, cobbled street

that turns with the hill’s contours, gusts of wind

whirl into the air small strips of gold paper,

detritus of New Year’s Eve celebrations,

and a party of Australian tourists

comes round the corner their resolute guide’s

tartan umbrella flapping unsafely.

 

*

 

The runway faces east so the plane

must bank westwards to fly by Vienna,

Prague, London to land at Manchester.

On the right are the Little Carpathians

with vineyards on the slopes and at their heart

wildernesses of beasts and plants still intact –

left, below, river, castle, tower blocks

reduced to perfection.

 

 

 

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POETRY

GERTRUDE BELL AND THE TREATY OF SÈVRES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.7K views

Paris, 1920

 

The treaty was signed in the Exhibition Room,

overseen by Marie Antoinette’s

dinner service. Like porcelain owls’ eyes,

they were witnesses of the delegates’ harsh

geometry, the fretwork jigsaw of desk

wallahs – Ottoman Mesopotamia

become modern Syria and Iraq.

 

Gertrude Bell was one of the delegates:

daughter of a philanthropic iron master;

Oxford graduate like T.E. Lawrence;

cartographer, mountaineer, linguist;

archaeologist, administrator,

public servant; Arabist, Al-Khatun,

‘Queen of the Desert’; poet, fluent

in Farsee, translator of Hafiz;

confidante of seraglios, anti-

Suffragist; anti-Zionist, maker

of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq.

 

London, 1915

 

Between postings, lobbying powerful men,

as always, to let her be useful,

she continued her letters to ‘Dick’,

Charles Doughty-Wylie, career diplomat

and soldier, the unrequited, married

love of her life – eclectic letters

of Whitehall gossip, geo-political

tactics, romantic longing, and sorrow

for the Great War’s slaughters. Her last letter

was never finished. She had learned

of his death in action at Gallipoli.

 

Baghdad, 1926

 

She died from an overdose of sleeping pills.

There was no evidence of suicide.

King Faisal, the monarch she had made and whom

she was finding ‘difficult’ of late,

watched, from the shade of his private balcony,

the coffin carried through the dust to the thump

and blare of the garrison’s brass band.

He could see the Tigris beyond the graveyard.

His grandson’s disfigured body would be hung

from a lamp post near the square where Saddam’s

prodigious statue would be toppled with ropes.

 

‘To steadfastness and patience, friend, ask not
If Hafiz keep–
Patience and steadfastness I have forgot,
And where is sleep?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

WILLIE AND THE HARE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.9K views

One had a lovely face,

And two or three had charm,

But charm and face were in vain

Because the mountain grass

Cannot but keep the form

Where the mountain hare has lain.

‘Memory,’ W.B. Yeats

 

Thomas Cubitt, London’s master builder, built

Woburn Buildings (on the Duke of Bedford’s land);

a pedestrianised street from Woburn Place

to what is now Euston Road, and abutting

St Pancras New Church with its caryatids

and ionic columns. Late Georgian London

on the up. Cubitt noted that hares came south

from Primrose Hill and from The Regent’s Park,

in the evenings, to rest on the paving stones.

 

W.B. Yeats, Willie to friends

and family, moved to the second floor

of number 18 ‘to be close to

the people’ or, rather, to further his

short-lived affair with his married mistress.

(That year Oscar Wilde chose not to cut

and run, and so found himself disgraced).

Willie noted a ‘handsome old grey hare’

resting beneath number 6’s bow window.

 

Two more London adoptees, Ezra Pound,

who brought T.S. Eliot, attended

Willie’s Monday ‘At Homes’, where Ezra

soon made himself indispensable,

dispensing his host’s Bushmills and Sweet Aftons,

then becoming his secretary,

marrying his mistress’s daughter

and dumping her in Paris with their son –

meanwhile making Yeats a modern poet.

 

Two geniuses and their mentor, mere

human beans all three, ambitious, amorous,

apprehensive, came and went – past

the shoemaker’s shop on the ground floor,

the workman and his family on the first,

and gossiped about art beneath the attic

where a pedlar painted water colours.

All are lost like the hares. Perhaps the bricks,

the pavings remember.

 

 

 

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