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May

VALENTINE WEATHERS

January is like navigating

ice floes – then eventually heading east

for aromatic landfalls, or west

following the setting sun, or south

for the long haul like some latter day Cook,

journeying without guides into foreign parts.

 

The first port of call is in February.

Love fills the sails, the swell lifts the bow.

We met one July, married one August.

In May our daughter will be fifty one.

The bow lifts in the swell, the canvas fills with love.

 

Fearing the doldrums, I write each poem

as if it were to be the last – whistling up

favourable words speaking of love,

voyaging without charts.

 

 

 

A POEM FOR MY DAUGHTER

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read455 views

To have a child, as you know well, is to have

someone always with you – their shadow,

their echo, their breathing – whatever

has happened, whatever may happen.

To have a daughter is to shape the future.

 

When we lived in a Victorian third floor

attic flat, that had been the nursery

and the children’s bedrooms, and the trees,

planted when the house was built, touched the panes,

and you were only a few weeks old

fifty years ago now, I began

a poem with this title — inspired

by Yeat’s poem ‘A Prayer For My Daughter:

‘Once more the wind is howling, and half hid

Under this cradle-hood and coverlid

My child sleeps on’ – when the Black & Tan War

raged, rampaged:  houses shelled and burned.

A first time father in his fifties,

he wished his daughter a modest beauty,

a becoming wit, and a good marriage!

 

It was a gentle, English May, and Wilson

was keeping us out of Vietnam.

I was a young man proud and fearful

of fatherhood – unmastered in either

the grandeur or simplicity of words.

All I could think to wish for you was health.

The poem stalled, was left unfinished, lost.

 

A few days old, your daughter lay in her crib,

in another Victorian house.

Outside the snow continued to fall

in that provincial city, slowing traffic,

drifting in gardens. Across an ocean

one of the worst earthquakes on record

razed the flimsy houses of the poor.

As you entered the room talking – wittily,

kindly, hopefully – she turned her nascent head

in your direction, hearing that sound

she had heard forever.

 

 

 

ALMOST ABOVE THE TREES

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read666 views

We were in the canopy among the owls

amid limes and sycamores at the top

of a three storey Victorian semi.

Ours was the children’s floor and the nannies’.

We furnished, decorated, carpeted.

We had our books, our prints, our piano –

and our child quickening in your belly.

I would feel it kick. Our neighbour one floor down

ran off with an actress. His little boy

rattled his play pen all day. In the winter,

mould grew in the bathroom, the gas boiler

shed bits of metal, ships on the river

blasted their fog horns. She was born in May.

Her cot was under a skylight. Leaves

stroked the glass, sunlight dappling her loveliness.

 

 

 

SWIFTS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read443 views

This morning apple blossom, scattered by

the softest of winds, showered me like

confetti and, by chance, I looked up

into a deep, deep cobalt sky and there

they were – one, two then a third and fourth –

arriving perennially at this time

here each May. Monogamous, returning

to the same nests until they die, each

generation nesting in the empty nests –

each generation now, as it returns yearly

from the tropics, finding more and more nests

gone as buildings are renovated

and new ones built sealed as airless boxes.

Aerobatic harbingers of summer

then autumn, once flocking our suburban sky,

are becoming presagers of dearth.

 

 

 

VALLE CRUCIS, LLANTYSILIO, LLANGOLLEN

Valle Crucis Abbey, Richard Wilson, circa 1760

 

 

Where willow stoops in curling shallows, May

stirs branches that creak like rigging or rub

like silk. The cuckoo sings its unsettling,

solemn roundelay. Sun gilds the abbey’s

west wall. The glassless rose window is a

blinded eye in a Romanesque skull –

indulgence in a wilderness. The Blood of

the Lamb coursed through the old ways of Keltoi,

Celtae, Celts. Time the dissembler leaches

the earth of language, artefact, intent.

 

A wall in the south transept was scorched by mishap

or mayhem. Dousing the flames, did the monks

break their vow? The Reformation empowered

even Trappists. Rulers destroy or endow

for glory. Defenders of parliament

effaced the cross (placed on a pagan mound)

carved to honour the Princes of Powys.

Even at the world’s furthest edge, even

beside an unkempt road through a valley,

was always a junction of opposites –

the classic, classical dichotomies

of the cerebellum and the soul, of

carapace and substance, tyranny and

learning. An oak tree, shaped like a brain, spins

the sun’s threads and is cleft, halved – fire and leaf.

 

 

 

A BOOK OF HOURS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read409 views

 

'Fevrier' from Les Tres Riche Heures du Duc De Berry
'Février' from Les Tres Riche Heures du Duc De Berry

 

July

We are rather formally attired

for country pursuits in the ducal woods;

August

me with a tie and you, I uncover,

with white suspenders and matching knickers.

September

Intimate stranger, forever touching

for your least kindness, forever surprising;

October

unpredictable as light, you bring

my heart from hiding again and again!

November

Earth warms. Ice melts. Seas rise. And nothing,

everything changes. Each day, we marvel.

December

Still flowering, for our wintry birthdays,

are fuchsias, geraniums, a rose.

January

As the tide turns, we watch snow drifting

landward over fields, woods, hilltops.

February

We turn for home – and, in the dark border

beneath the ivy, find the first snowdrop.

March

Our camellia flowers: hardy, exotic.

Palaces are stormed. Governments fall.

April

Somewhere the wind is always blowing.

We make our house tight against all weathers.

May

A solitary swift arrives, gliding,

banking, silent. Our daughter is born.

June

And verdant England is replete with bird song,

with that hushed stirring, that old, old promise.