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pest

POETRY

THE VIEW FROM THE BASTION

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.7K views

With her new camera, a  Christmas present,

and with the intuitive surety,

at not quite nine, of how to make a picture,

she makes a sunlit panorama of Pest

from the Fisherman’s Bastion in Buda –

a Magyar edifice of walls and towers

built in the nineteen hundreds to celebrate

the permanence of the Habsburg Empire.

In a wall’s shadow she shows me the screen,

and what she has angled by chance. I note

the parliament building, the Great Synagogue,

the space where Imry Nagy’s statue was.

 

Beside a bronze equestrian statue

of Stephen the First, between the Bastion

and St Matthias Church, a white tailed eagle

and its handler (dressed for Ruritania)

wait for selfies with passing tourists.

She catches one such from the rear – a man

diminished by the bird perched on his shoulder.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE FALL OF SPARROWS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

Commensal with humans for 10,000 years,

since the first cultivation of barley

and wheat, the house sparrow, that communal

eater of insects and seeds, is ubiquitous –

from Kolkata to Coventry, Haifa

to Hawaii – sometimes a pest, a pet

or on a plate; a symbol of lechery

or vulgarity – but in decline here

because of pesticides perhaps

or mobile phones, car parks, unleaded petrol.

 

Certainly, we miss the small flocks in the shrubs

and their rapid, ceaseless chatterings.

A lone bird appears occasionally,

silent mostly but for the odd, ‘chirrup, chirrup’.

So, as Hamlet says, ‘…we defy augury.

There’s a special providence in the fall

of a sparrow… if it be not now,

yet it will come – the readiness is all.’

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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