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POETRY

TRAILS OF TEARS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.2K views

Alexis De Tocqueville, in DEMOCRACY

IN AMERICA, witnesses an event

on the Trail of Tears: the expulsion

of the so-called Five Civilised Tribes –

Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee,

and Seminole – from the Deep South.

They were expelled to make way for share croppers,

gold prospectors, cotton plantations.

The government promised the people asylum

on what it described as empty grasslands

to the west of the Mississippi.

 

In December 1831

De Tocqueville is in Memphis, Tennessee.

The snow has frozen hard, and immense ice floes

are moving fast down the Mississippi.

He watches a large family group of Choctaws

arrive, among them are old people dying

and newborns. Their possessions are only

what they have been able to carry

on the long exhausting walk from the south east.

They are silent as they pass him, knowing

their injuries are beyond remedy.

There is no room for their dogs in the vessels

that will take them across to the west bank.

As the boats leave the shore the dogs begin to howl,

then enter the icy waters to follow them.

 

***

 

De Tocqueville’s sympathetic testimony

seems the exception that proves the following

rule: that it is some sort of hubris makes

those of European heritage

record and justify – almost by default –

in detail, and with self-righteousness,

their settler-colonial iniquities,

their removal of people from their homelands,

their furtherance of capitalism,

whether by cavalry, cannons, starvation,

litigation, fraud, whether in

the Americas, Ireland, Siberia,

Australia, Algeria, New Zealand,

Indo-China, Malaya, Kenya,

Tanzania, Uganda, Rhodesia,

South Africa…

 

 

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POETRY

SNOWDROPS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

In a weathered flower pot, its dark green glaze

inscribed with abstractions, are four snowdrops,

carefully planted like the four points

of a weather vane, their blooms, as yet

still tight, unopened, like paper lanterns

on long curving poles – as if in the lush heat

and humidity of some miniature,

ornamental, oriental garden

replete with palm fronds, and liana,

and distant gongs. In an easterly wind –

that has been blowing for days from the tundras

of Siberia, over the vast lowlands

of the European Plain, and the grim

North Sea, across the moorlands of the Peaks,

and the clayey fields of the Cheshire Gap –

they are trembling slightly.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

HINDSIGHT

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

From Moscow to London, Stockholm to Venice

the world froze at 10, 12, 15 below

for three months. Wine froze in bottles, cows in byres,

and wolves came down to villages scavenging.

Tree trunks shattered. Church bells once rung fractured.

Travellers crossed the Baltic on horse-back,

skaters glided under the Rialto.

 

The War of Spanish Succession was paused

for more clement weather – and regiments

of Swedish soldiers died in Russian blizzards,

ceding victory in the Great Northern War

to Peter the Great almost by default.

(Both Napoleon and Hitler ignored

that hard lesson about Russian winters).

 

Climatologists cannot agree

on what caused the Great Frost: the prolonged absence

of sunspots, perhaps, or volcanic ash

from recent eruptions, Vesuvius,

Santorini. Trade stopped. Hundreds of thousands

perished in a flu pandemic, or starved

to death. Louis XIV ordered bread

be given to the poor. Even the Sun King,

at his new palace in Versailles, felt obliged

to try to save the lives of mere strangers.

 

***

 

In The Gulag Archipelago’s Preface

Solzhenitsyn quotes a peasant proverb:

‘Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.

Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes’.

 

He opens the Preface with an anecdote,

a story he encountered in a magazine.

Political prisoners, from one

of the many Kolyma labour camps

in the Siberian tundra, by chance

dug up a frozen subterranean stream,

with fish preserved in motion for tens

of millennia. The prisoners

broke the ice, ate the fish.

 

 

 

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