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Morocco

POETRY

A DAY OUT

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read1.9K views

From one of the high rise budget hotels

in Portimao we picked up a group

of six challenged men and their two minders.

(Portugal, our tour guide told us later,

was enabling those – institutionalised

since childhood for learning difficulties –

to take vacations, with supervision,

from the drab, echoing, noisome halls).

Two were remarkable: a gaunt fellow

bent permanently double, always moving,

keeping close to the other, a joker

with moustached Arabic looks and frightened eyes.

 

We crossed the Arade – more reed bed now

than river – and entered ancient Silves;

visited the cathedral – an erstwhile mosque –

and the Moorish castle. The jester

talked almost without breathing, the bent chap

by his side. We drove through regimented

plantations of pine, acacia,

eucalyptus, climbing towards the spa town

of Caldas de Monchique – cool beneath its oaks

and umbrella pines. The stooped lad

ran quickly from shade to shade. His mate

spoke rapidly to the halcyon air.

 

We ascended Mount Foia – with its shop,

café, and air force radar station.

Westwards we could see Cape St Vincent,

the Atlantic – south imagine Morocco.

The two young men were sitting on a step,

out of the wind, smoking roll ups, watching

a family – mum and dad, two boys –

flying a crimson kite.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE STREET PARTY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.7K views

Above every Mairie flaps the Tricolour.

On every lawn, in every yard through the gut

of America – where the Great Plains began

before the farmers came with wheat and pigs

and soya fields – Old Glory flutters.

Above the reception desk in every

riad in Morocco the king’s photo hangs.

Here, things are never that unambiguous.

 

In a street near the foot of the Downs,

too steep for tables, they have strung bunting

from house to house, moved cars, hired a leaning

bouncy castle and shared barbecues.

 

This chalk, grassland common – that slopes upwards

to the flint ridge with its Pilgrim’s Way,

from Winchester to Canterbury,

for a Norman priest killed by Norman lords –

is a (mostly) English floral lexicon:

Meadow Cranesbane, Meadow Vetchling, Yellow-rattle,

Dove’s Foot Cranesbill,  Common Spotted Orchid.

 

A Skylark ascends from the unmown grasses.

I think of Vaughan Williams’ orchestral piece,

with its shimmering solo violin,

the George Meredith poem which inspired it –

‘He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake’ –

Celts evoking the essence of what was theirs.

 

The party dwindles as the drizzle arrives.

To be English is to be contrarian –

not being Irish, Scots, Welsh or ‘foreign’.

At the top of the street, a patriot with

a large, St George’s Cross drooping above

the privet hedge, has lit a bonfire

in a garden incinerator.  The rain,

now heavy, drums on the lid and, though sodden –

being dressed in England football strip –

he forces wet, tabloid newspapers down

the narrow funnel. Acrid smoke wafts up.

 

 

 

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