Tag Archives

metaphor

OCCAM’S RAZOR…

…a maxim named for a Franciscan friar,

William of Ockham, from the Surrey village –

and from London, Oxford, Avignon,

Munich – Pope’s enemy, Emperor’s friend,

dying just as the Black Death was scourging.

 

It is a metaphor, not logic chopping –

best summarised, perhaps, as ‘less is more’,

‘don’t over-egg the pudding’, even

‘fine words butter no parsnips’. He was

the radical philosopher of his age,

a nominalist – words are words, ideas

ideas, no more, no less. Plato, relinquo!

 

Avoiding an A3 rush hour traffic jam,

I drove through Ockham one rainy night,

watching the headlights follow the bendy turns

of the old field system and glisten

on the hedgerows and the oaks, and I thought

of the little boy, the brightest scholar

in the priest’s small school, being taken

for Mother Church’s future to London

in a jolting ox cart, his Latin

a passport through Europe.

 

 

 

AUGUST 4TH 2014

An exceptionally sunny, cloudless day

has packed Benllech Beach at low water

with hundreds of gaudy strangers. Meanwhile,

the pomp begins and ‘sacrifice’ is talked of

as if the lambs themselves had chosen it.

 

On the clear horizon, container ships

and oil tankers are hoved to, waiting

for high water so they can safely clear

the Liverpool Bar – a compacted sandbank –

something I have seen many times but

only now recall a great grand father,

retired from sailing ‘coffin ships’ to Boston,

was captain of the Bar lightship. He died

before the century turned so never saw

his oldest son earn his Master’s Ticket

nor learn he had chosen to go down

with his ship, torpedoed off Cape Verde.

 

As the waters rise the fainthearted leave.

The inexorable ships steer east.

The day will end with Sir Edward Grey’s

metaphor of the lamps made fatuous.

 

 

 

BEASTLINESS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read322 views

‘…hardly any Jews!’, The Matabele Campaign 1896, Colonel R.S.S. Baden-Powell, Methuen, London, 1897.

 

The British in Africa seem always

to have verged on the comical. There was

BP chasing a Matabele girl

through bush. He was ahorse, she on foot.

In tranquillity, he sketched the scene – the girl

bare-footed and -breasted, himself at a

gallop – for publication. She escaped –

but Rhodesia was made safe for Cecil,

the continent for Aids and exploitation.

Jingoist, philistine, racist and snob,

was BP conditioned or conditioning?

The darkness at the heart of Africa

is white man’s metaphor.

 

 

Note: first published on the site in October 2010.

 

 

 

AT JODRELL BANK

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read481 views

The radio telescope trundles on rails

in a landscape of dairy cows and ponds,

tuning into the dispersing cosmos.

The universe is replete with sound. We

fill it with meaning and impedimenta.

Star sailors embark on metaphor

and intricate engines. We record

the energy of suns dead longer than

dinosaurs. We listen to stars yet

tolerate hunger – and we stare still

into the black wonder of starry nights.

Like addicts, we exploit experience.

The ether is redolent with humankind,

our majestic jabber.

 

Acknowledgement: This poem was first published in ‘Still Life’, a poetry anthology published by University of Chester Press – http://www.chester.ac.uk/search/node/still%20life

BEASTLINESS

‘…hardly any Jews!’, The Matabele Campaign 1896,
Colonel R.S.S. Baden-Powell, Methuen, London, 1897


The British in Africa seem always

to have verged on the comical. There was

BP chasing a Matabele girl

through bush. He was ahorse, she on foot.

In tranquillity, he sketched the scene – the girl

bare-footed and -breasted, himself at a

gallop – for publication. She escaped –

but Rhodesia was made safe for Cecil,

the continent for Aids and exploitation.

Jingoist, philistine, racist and snob,

was BP conditioned or conditioning?

The darkness at the heart of Africa

is white man’s metaphor.