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Surrey Hills

POETRY

LEITH HILL PLACE, SURREY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read412 views

On this late summer Sunday afternoon

a line of smoke drifts from woodlands below

that seem to stretch almost unbroken

to the South Downs distant, cerulean.

Out of sight is England’s long southern coast.

Dressed limestone forms the house’s facade.

It is imbedded with severed fossils.

 

Through an open window there is music,

a piano. On the lawn are cream teas

and wasps. A buzzard is circling far off.

Josiah Wedgwood retired here, Darwin

visited and Ralph Vaughan Williams composed.

They were related, a Victorian

pantheon – industry, science, art.

 

We cross mowed pastureland to the car park.

A cow frolics away amongst the ferns.

I think of bottle kilns dark in smoke,

and the wet shine of clay revolving,

evolving on a humming, ceaseless wheel,

and, some bright morning, the rising of a lark.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

LA PERRUCHE ET LA SIRÈNE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read455 views

‘Even if I could have done when I was young what I’m doing now –
and it is what I dreamed of then – I wouldn’t have dared.’  Henri Matisse

 

In his early eighties – a magician
in colours with his (genuinely)
lovely assistant, Lydia – Matisse
creates a canvas, twenty five foot
by eleven, of pinned-on then glued-on
painted paper cut-outs of fronds and fruits,
in many colours, and a profound blue
parakeet and a profound blue mermaid –
seductive, tropical and teeming…
his Oceania revisited,
his northener’s revelation of the south.

There are parakeets – befittingly green –
in the Surrey Hills and mermaids rumoured,
hair flowing fast, far upstream in the Wey.
There are, for certain, by Afon Conwy
sea lavender, thrift and birds foot trefoil
and, in the channels the low tide forms,
curlews and egrets wading and the sea-racked,
black struts of wrecks. Beyond are the purple, mauve,
lilac mountains…my epiphany, my south.

I cut and paste at will and muse with my
‘assistant’ of so many years – lovely,
genuine – on art, youth and aspiration.
Had I known when I became a poet
half a century ago that I could write
this then would I have dared?

 

 

 

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POETRY

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read702 views

Curtains drawn against late October twilight,

working on verses about burgeoning flocks

of raucous, emerald Ring-necked Parakeets

in the Surrey Hills, I hear the murmur

of girls. It is Halloween. The bell rings.

There is a bevy of neighbours’ daughters –

one with a painted face, all on the cusp

of womanhood – lovely, ingenuous.

 

From habit, I watch them safely down the street

and then, before I shut the door, look up

at the night sky, craning my neck with wonder.

Cloud obscures all but Jupiter, Mars, Venus.

It would be tempting to believe not merely

in physical forces and chemical

reactions but design and purpose

through the kaleidoscope of the universe –

and in the countless stars’ unheard music.

 

After supper, I begin another piece:

about the Ghetto in Golden Prague –

with its learning, its music and its art –

which Hitler decreed should be preserved as

a raree show for ‘Judenrein Europa’.

Daily, new stones are placed on the tomb

of Rabbi Judah Levai ben Bezalel,

Talmudic scholar and Kabbalistic mystic,

legendary creator, from Vltava mud,

of The Golem to scourge the anti-semites,

and battler with Azrael, the angel of death,

to protect his only granddaughter.

 

***

 

In the opposite corner of the room

in which I write is an Edwardian

upright piano, an inanimate

companion since my early childhood.

Our granddaughter asks to be lifted

onto the too high stool and tries the notes,

now loud, now soft,  with the flats of her hands,

hearing with wonder the unending sounds.

 

 

 

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