Tag Archives

Rome

THEMES

THEMES: THE RIVER DEE, CHESTER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read537 views

This is the second post in this category, one which brings together poems with a connecting theme.

The Dee, which rises in North Wales and enters Liverpool Bay and the Irish Sea through the vast Dee Estuary, flows through the city of Chester in North West England. There is a  stretch of the river – no longer perhaps than a third of a mile – that flows past a tree-lined embankment called The Groves. The titles and opening lines of all of the poems inspired by that stretch are listed in alphabetical order. Please click on the title to read the whole poem.

 

CORMORANTS

In the driest months when the tidal river

is low and the current almost lethargic,

when the waters flow gently over the weir

the Normans built to create a fish pool…

 

COURAGE

In the stretch from here to where the river bends

around the meadows, there have been drownings –

…A children’s cancer charity has fastened

awareness-raising memento mori

to the railings of a suspension footbridge…

 

SALMON LEAP

An aged busker in a Stetson sets up

on the river embankment near the café.

He talks at length about his life, then sings

Carole King’s ‘And it’s too late, baby now’…

 

THE BANDSTAND

Beside the city’s  river is a bandstand –

Victorian, octagonal in shape,

with eight delicate wrought iron columns –

redolent of summer Sunday afternoons,

and the poignant breathiness of brass bands…

 

THE CYBER DEAD

‘Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door,’ a busker

began to sing near to the ice cream kiosk,

just after I had left the public toilet,

its adamantine urinals made

in Burnley…

 

THE EMBRACE OF NOTHING

Rome’s legionnaires quarried its sandstone cliffs

and Ptolemy put the Dee on the map.

William the Conqueror, in winter,

force-marched his army over the Pennines

to reach the river and waste the town…

 

THE GROVES

We are sitting on a bench in a peaceful

place popular even on a winter’s day

now lockdown has been eased. This tree-lined

terraced embankment beside the river…

 

THE RIVER

This river, deeper than most in metaphor,

abundantly fluent in simile,

is in spate…

 

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

FEBRUARY BURNING

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read728 views

One Saturday in February we drove

from Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport

north up the valley of the Tiber

to Umbertide in Umbria,

a town bridging the river’s upper reaches,

and that had guarded the northern Marches

during the bloody and iconoclastic

turbulence of the Renaissance.

We passed Orvieto and Perugia.

The sun shone unseasonably unfettered,

emollient as a British day in late June.

Folk were sunbathing on the grassy banks

of the motorway service stations.

When we reached our hotel on the town’s outskirts

the air was soft as on a summer’s evening.

Next day, St Valentine’s, the cathedral’s bell

ringing for mattutino, the flat fields

of vines, where lovers and iconoclasts

might lie – between the curving river

and the long road south – were drowned in mists.

 

This month, that here always used to be bleak

and wet, has become a changeling. Years

after Umbertide, on another

Valentine’s, we sat on a council bench

beside the corniche in the lee of the Orme,

sunning ourselves like superannuated

terrapins. The uninhibited sun

burned through a haze of blushing coral

above Penmaenmawr over the bay.

Februarius from februum,

‘purification’ – perhaps like the heat

and the calm of love’s absolution.

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

MEDITATIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read2.6K views

‘The Third Man…a revelation…’

Martin Scorsese, THE INDEPENDENT, 2015

 

There is no mention in Graham Greene’s novella

The Third Man, or in his screenplay, or even

the shooting script, of Café Marc Aurel –

to which, in the movie, Joseph Cotten

aka Holly Martins, writer of Westerns,

has lured his friend Orson Welles aka

Harry Lime, racketeer, only to be

thwarted by Allida Valli aka

Anna Schimdt, actress at the Josefstadt

Theater, and Harry Lime’s faithful lover.

 

***

 

On a rainy day trip to old Vienna,

knowing the Café did not exist

and never did, we were determined

to see the extant Weiner Riesenrad,

from whose brief circular zenith Orson Welles

meditated on the human condition,

democracy, and Swiss-made cuckoo clocks.

 

So who better to ask for directions

among the shopping crowds on Kaernterstrasse

than two young men in smart-casual attire

manning a stall promoting the Marcus

Aurelius Foundation, whose mission is

‘to support young people to live a life of

clarity and purpose’ through Stoicism.

Where else than the city of Freud and Mahler

to learn how to live with the fear of death!

 

***

 

Marcus Aurelius – sixteenth Emperor

of Rome and last of the Pax Romana –

is most famous now for his Meditations,

a collection of his stoical

aphorisms, two of which are as follows:

‘We love ourselves more than other people,

yet care more about their opinion

than our own…’ – and ‘If it is not right do not

do it; if it is not true do not say it…’

 

The Emperor while campaigning against

the Germanic Tribes died, allegedly,

in Vindobona, present day Vienna.

Some say he had just inscribed

the following: ‘Act as if every

action is the last action of your life’.

 

***

 

The Café’s name is secure in black and white

celluloid above a shop front

in a partially bombed square

just round the corner from Marc-Aurel-Strasse:

the interior lit from a distance

to look like a café – though the action

was filmed at Elstree Studios, Borehamwood,

London. The film unit on the spot

must have decided the place needed a name

so perhaps Greene, the ever ironic

Balliol history graduate, suggested

Marcus Aurelius – and Carol Reed,

the director, chose the shortened version

to fit. Did Greene mention that the emperor

most probably died somewhere else,

namely Sirmium, one of the oldest

cities in Europe, and birthplace of ten

Roman emperors, now present day

Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia?

Both Harry and Marcus elusive in death?

 

***

 

The Emperor was cremated and deified.

In Rome’s Piazza Colonna – off

the Via Del Corso, where the Jews

were paraded and mocked each Mardi Gras –

is a column commemorating

the Emperor’s victories in battle

(though not, of course, his Meditations),

probably begun in his lifetime.

When Christianity prevailed his statue

topping it was replaced by one of St Paul

aka Saul of Tarsus, Anatolia –

now present day Turkey – the city

where Mark Antony first met Cleopatra.

 

***

 

In the movie, whose constant backdrop

are the literal ruins of bombed Vienna,

with the four Occupying Powers – Britain,

France, Russia, and the USA – playing

a key role in the story as both

dei and diaboli ex machina,

nobody ever asks where the Jews have gone.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
POETRY

CONVERT OR DIE

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

In a large chamber behind the colossal

Doric colonnades four columns deep –

Bernini’s ‘maternal arms of mother church’ –

that enclose both sides of St Peter’s Square

is an exhibition: How Christ Was Brought

To The New World. There are extensive maps

and long lists of dates, the occasional

Christian martyr’s cross or chasuble,

and illustrations of happy converts,

but not a hint of the laying waste

to inconvenient cultures, the blood

and lamentation, the casuistry,

the theft, and servitude.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments
POETRY

GUESTS OF LIFE

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.4K views

‘We are the guests of life.’ Martin Heidegger

 ‘In ancient Greek the word for ‘guest’ is the same as the word for ‘foreigner’: xenos. And if you were to ask me to define our tragic condition, it’s that the word ‘xenophobia’ survives, and is commonly used, everyone understands it; but the word ‘xenophilia’ has disappeared…’ George Steiner

 

For Cicero books were the ‘soul of the house’.

The Ancient Romans knew a thing or two

about staying safe in uncivil times.

Nevertheless on his way to sail abroad

the lawyer, statesman, writer, orator

polymath was assassinated

by Roman soldiers obeying the orders

of a vindictive kleptocracy. His head

and his hands were nailed up in The Forum.

Each autumn an affliction of starlings

would swoop above Rome like a chattering net.

Now in the abandoned Coliseum

there are only cats, and the shadows of cats.

 

I watch a neighbour’s cat  – obviously

well fed at home, sleek, sharp-eyed – practising

its instinctive hunting skills in our garden.

Its belly to the ground, it pads forward,

inch by silent inch, then leaps on its prey –

a peacock butterfly opening its wings.

Shocked I almost cry out – but what should

cats know about the absence of butterflies,

or butterflies about the instincts of cats?

But we do – who will risk death to nurse strangers,

and who will slaughter others in a moment.

 

There is no one available now to wind

the parish church clock, whose bells chimed

the quarters and the hours through world wars,

whose hands moved implacably. I can glimpse

the steeple, as I walk the hundred paces

along our garden paths, over the lawns,

across the terraces – where my lovely ghosts

jostle at each turn. I think of house arrest,

self-exile – Ovid, Galileo, the Franks –

note the laburnum’s yellow ringlets

loud with bees, and the wisteria’s sweet

sensuous perfume, the blackbirds nesting

in the ivy, magpies in the snowy drifts

of the pear tree, and consider myself

blessed, if there were blessings to be doled,

having people to love who are living.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
5 Comments
POETRY

APOCALYPSE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

Via Del Corso, Rome, March 2020.

The boutiques had been closed by decree, even

Calvin Klein Underwear and Brooks Brothers.

The only pedestrians were the Pope,

in his white robes, and his bodyguard,

in bulging suits – on a pilgrimage

to the ancient church of San Marcello

set back from the street. Beneath a crucifix,

used to assuage a 15th century plague,

Pope Francis prayed to God to stop the virus.

 

The street, in Roman times, was Via Lata –

Broad Way – and ran through the Field of Mars

towards the Adriatic. At Mardi Gras,

in the Renaissance, the Ghetto was emptied

and the Jews paraded along the street

so that the Christians could mock and scorn.

 

Italy’s churches had been closed by decree –

except in the north where some were being used

as temporary morgues, from which corpses

were taken, for cremation, day and night,

by slow convoys of army lorries.

 

Like riderless horses around a race track,

history repeats and repeats, and God,

who was thought to be dead, may merely be deaf.

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments