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Persepolis

SATANS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read5.3K views

Is there some primate imperative, some

genetic human want, need, reverence for

so-called strong leaders, those masters of

othering, destroyers of order,

adepts in venality and stupidity,

casual slaughterers of innocence?

 

Israel attacks Iran on a pretext from the

loan library of Pretexts – more or less

the same pretext Alexander the Great

borrowed when he burned Persepolis,

(city of the Persians). Iran borrows

from the library of Virility

and attacks Israel – the same library the Crusaders used

when they captured Jerusalem and slaughtered

Jews and Muslims, men, women, and children.

 

And the world’s self-appointed Policeman –

in hock to Christian Evangelists

and Fossil Fuel Companies and the concept

of Full Spectrum Dominance – plays his trump card,

a TV series entitled THE END

OF DAYS, with seven full length episodes:

‘Iraq’, ‘Libya’, ‘Somalia’, ‘Sudan’,

‘Lebanon’, ‘Syria’, ‘Iran’; the seven

countries of the apocalypse; repeat.

 

Opportunists and fanatics, rich boys

and malignant narcissists, greedy shits

and unhinged rhetoricians, sadists

and chaps with things to prove are, it seems,

like the poor, always to be with us

to the very end of history.

 

 

LAKE URMIA

In Old Persian, language of the Shah of Shahs,

Darius the Great, whose inscriptions

extend from Persepolis to Egypt,

and from Romania to Bahrain,

this salt lake, greater than the Dead Sea,

was called Chichast, ‘Glittering’ – sunlight

on the undulating lapidary

of myriads of silver particles.

Urmia – Assyrian Aramaic

for ‘City of Water’ – is high above

the lake on a fertile plateau

of orchards, grape vines, tobacco fields.

The city, a millennium ago,

was diverse, cosmopolitan, tolerant:

Christians, Jews, Muslims; Azeris,

Armenians, Assyrians, Persians, Kurds.

The Christians went first – massacred by the Turks

crossing the border. The Jews left for Israel.


Global warming is turning the lake

into an industrial salt pan the ancients

would have envied. Encrusted pedalos

and stranded diving boards in silent

holiday resort towns around the coast

glare like gargantuan rhinestones.

ONLY ARTIFICE WILL REMAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

When a joiner made the oak frame of this

long sash window, when a builder set it

in the wall, when a glazier puttied

in the panes that keep the weathers in their place,

all I would have seen were hedges, fields, ponds

and grazing dairy cattle – before the rise,

the decline and the fall, in a hundred

and sixty years, of so many empires.

 

When I stand on the back doorstep and search

for the stars amid the urban glare and the overcast

and then look down I see me silhouetted

in the gazebo’s windows – like the figure,

in ‘Las Meninas’, whom we see through

an open door, having paused climbing the stairs

to briefly watch paint capture majesty.

 

I think of Xerses, anticipating

victory over all of Greece, the world,

watching his armies cross the Bosporus

into Europe, suddenly weeping,

knowing that none of them would be alive

a hundred years from then – and longing

for the pillars and for the gardens

of Persepolis. A century or more

later, Alexander the Great will scourge

the city’s entire populace. Only

artifice will remain.