London

POETRY

INTENSIVE

By David SelzerMarch 24, 20171 Comment1 min read1.8K views

‘The body is…an extraordinary laboratory of possibility.’

Anthony Gormley

One sunny September Saturday I left

the Welcome Collection’s airy reading room,

stopped at the Picasso mural then took

the wide circular staircase past floors of

exemplary, aesthetic exhibits

of grave clothes, dentist drills, tranquillisers,

body parts, through the café and bookshop

into Euston Road’s fumy hugger-mugger.

I heard the siren first, behind me, saw

the traffic, past Euston towards St Pancras,

begin to slow as one of Great Ormond Street’s

acute care ambulances barrelled

down the outside lane then suddenly swerved

through an emergency services gap

in the central barrier and drove towards

the three lanes of oncoming vehicles

paused at the lights where the ambulance

would turn right – and I paused, amidst London’s

extravagant roar, moved by all this

for such a little life.

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POETRY

THE AQUEDUCT

By David SelzerNovember 6, 20152 Comments1 min read2K views

At the bottom of the valley – here briefly
more gorge than valley – the ice age river
runs white and rapid. Deep in its narrow banks
rest the vast brick columns of the aqueduct
that carries, in a narrow cast iron canal,
one hundred and twenty seven feet above,
water from the river tapped upstream –
Thomas Telford’s genius, recognised
as one with the Statue of Liberty,
the Taj Mahal and the Acropolis
and become a stop for Japanese tourists.

Above the valley along the toll road
Telford built from Holyhead to London
is the scattered village developed and named
for the aqueduct – Froncysyllte* –
of a thousand souls at its zenith.

On the war memorial by the roadside
there are thirty six names – the first two
from the Boer War. Two small plaques list
the World War dead – and, between them, an ornate,
tiled drinking fountain (now dry) for the lads
lost on the high veld, one in battle,
the other from typhoid. The legend is
Parcher Y Dewr – ‘respect the brave’.
By chance or design, you would have had to
bow your head, when, at the turn of a tap,
the waters from ancient volcanoes
would spring into your mouth.

*Pronounced: Vron-cuss-ulth-teh.

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POETRY

THE GATES OF MERCY

By David SelzerSeptember 24, 20152 Comments2 min read1.9K views

‘…Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib’d alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind…’
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

When I was a pre-pubescent boy, I read
The Eagle – having graduated from
the seditious slapstick of The Beano
and The Dandy – a comic with Christian
values, though the masthead did not say so.
Its heroes were square-jawed with no moral flaws:
Dan Dare, Storm Nelson, PC 49,
Harris Tweed and Tommy Walls – ice cream
and woven cloth, such product placements!

The centre pages showed cutaways of
torpedo boats and aircraft carriers.
The prevalent villain was the Mekon
from Venus, with his hydrocephalic head,
riding some technological wizardry.
But worthiness would always triumph.
The lives of St Patrick and St Paul
featured, if I remember – citizens
of Rome and brothers in Christ triumphant.

I thought of those evolutionary charts,
beloved of late Victorians, showing
homo sapiens – upright, striding forth –
ascending left to right from ambling apes,
thought progress inevitable
when, adolescent and idealistic,
a young man and political, I believed
we could build Jerusalem, make it
as clean as Dan Dare’s London, make it
out of kindness and justice and children
ascending but we are slamming fast – even
unto the third and fourth generation –
the gates of mercy.

Note: The poem has been featured in ‘INTO AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE WITH DAN DARE’ – http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/into-uncertain-future-with-dan-dare.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=linkedin

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POETRY

PHILLIS WHEATLEY: 1753-1784

By David SelzerJuly 29, 20152 Comments2 min read3.2K views

Enslaved in the Gambia or Senegal,
scholars surmise, she survived the nauseous
and violent bottom line of the
Triangular Trade to be bought aged eight
as a maid for his wife by John Wheatley,
merchant and tailor of British-ruled Boston,
a known progressive in education.

She was christened ‘Phillis’ after the slave ship
that took her childhood. She was prodigious
and was removed from domestic duties.
Tutored by his daughter, at twelve she knew
Latin, Greek, the Bible and, later,
became a genius of Augustan
couplets – their wit, their beat, their certainty.
With her master’s son, she went to London,
where her poems were published to some acclaim.
Her encomium to George Washington
was re-published by Thomas Paine. ‘Proceed…
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.’

Ah, how we tolerate unflinchingly,
unthinkingly absurd and absolute
contradictions – freedom and servitude,
enlightenment and doctrinal dogma!
‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.’

On Wheatley’s death she was freed – all that his will
left her: liberty without means. She married
a free black grocer. They lived in poverty.
Two infant children died. And yet she wrote –
but without white, male or titled patrons
was unpublished. Her husband was jailed for debt.
She supported herself and her sickly son
as a scullery maid. One December day
they died in squalor, were laid in unmarked graves.

What did she choose to remember of the seas
pounding against the timbers and the cries
and the chains days after days after days?
Or the drums into the night; or the smoke
from the cooking fires at dawn; the bright clothes;
the songs; her mother’s voice?

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POETRY

SOMETHING LOST IN TRANSLATION

By David SelzerOctober 17, 20141 Comment2 min read2K views

We are in the thronging, discordant food hall
at Euston Station, London, sipping
a latte and an americano from Caffé Ritazza,
taking the first bite of our Upper Crust bagettes –
mozzarella & tomato, pastrami & emmental –
while looking out for the disabled pigeon
that hops, scavenging, under the tables,
when we are approached, politely, gently,
by a bearded man with a shabby shoulder bag
from which he presents us with
an asymmetrically trimmed piece of paper
comprising a printed list, which appears
as if processed on an Amstrad PC:
‘I am a deaf mute.
I have no work.
I have a family to support.
Please help me, for the love of God.’
He also leaves a professionally produced
Romanian (we think) prayer card.
We notice he has disseminated the sheets
and the cards to all the tables
in our vicinity. He returns for the harvest.
Some give, most do not. We contribute more or less
the tithe of our meal. He takes his printed sheet,
leaves us the card, nodding his unsmiling thanks.
He moves on. The cacophony returns.

On the Virgin train to Crewe, we log-on.
‘Maica Domnului’, the prayer begins
– Romanian, ‘Mother of God’. (The giver
may be Roma, we think – informed judgement
or prejudice). It is, we deduce,
St Augustine’s intercessory prayer.
On the front of the card an icon
of the Virgin and Child is reproduced.
Mother and son are appropriately doleful.
She points to him, as if saying, ‘He is the one’.
Perhaps we have been conned. Maybe
our meek beggar has an apartment at Canary Wharf,
with those other cartoon characters,
The Masters of the Universe, and our modest gamble
will not have paid off. In English, as in Romanian,
‘charity’ and ‘justice’ are Latinate words. The British,
like the Roman Empire, kept the concepts distinct.
Interestingly, in Hebrew, one word encompasses both.