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Syria

POETRY

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.

 

 

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POETRY

VESTIGES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

We followed the signs from the car park.

Set on a promontory high above

the Bay of Episkopi, more or less intact,

was a Roman stadium, of classical

Olympic dimensions – eight runners,

two chariots’ wide. The early spring

late afternoon sun lit beige sandstone blocks

too big for the natives to have purloined.

As we were leaving a flock of goats chimed

in the scrub beside the stadium’s back wall.

 

That part of Cyprus officially

is British Overseas Territory,

as sovereign as, say, Salisbury Plain.

We passed an armed camp with high fences

and barrack huts and then, distantly

and also fenced, family quarters –

an estate of white semis with pitched roofs.

 

Only days after we had returned home

Tornados from RAF Akrotiri

launched missiles at sites in Syria.

Much of Eurasia is littered with

imperial ruins.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

GERTRUDE BELL AND THE TREATY OF SÈVRES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

Paris, 1920

 

The treaty was signed in the Exhibition Room,

overseen by Marie Antoinette’s

dinner service. Like porcelain owls’ eyes,

they were witnesses of the delegates’ harsh

geometry, the fretwork jigsaw of desk

wallahs – Ottoman Mesopotamia

become modern Syria and Iraq.

 

Gertrude Bell was one of the delegates:

daughter of a philanthropic iron master;

Oxford graduate like T.E. Lawrence;

cartographer, mountaineer, linguist;

archaeologist, administrator,

public servant; Arabist, Al-Khatun,

‘Queen of the Desert’; poet, fluent

in Farsee, translator of Hafiz;

confidante of seraglios, anti-

Suffragist; anti-Zionist, maker

of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq.

 

London, 1915

 

Between postings, lobbying powerful men,

as always, to let her be useful,

she continued her letters to ‘Dick’,

Charles Doughty-Wylie, career diplomat

and soldier, the unrequited, married

love of her life – eclectic letters

of Whitehall gossip, geo-political

tactics, romantic longing, and sorrow

for the Great War’s slaughters. Her last letter

was never finished. She had learned

of his death in action at Gallipoli.

 

Baghdad, 1926

 

She died from an overdose of sleeping pills.

There was no evidence of suicide.

King Faisal, the monarch she had made and whom

she was finding ‘difficult’ of late,

watched, from the shade of his private balcony,

the coffin carried through the dust to the thump

and blare of the garrison’s brass band.

He could see the Tigris beyond the graveyard.

His grandson’s disfigured body would be hung

from a lamp post near the square where Saddam’s

prodigious statue would be toppled with ropes.

 

‘To steadfastness and patience, friend, ask not
If Hafiz keep–
Patience and steadfastness I have forgot,
And where is sleep?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

ICONS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.1K views

From the restaurant terrace on the cliff top

at Agios Giorgios, Cape Drepanos,

we can see the small harbour below,

its sea wall curved like a scythe and, opposite,

the flat topped, steep sided, uninhabited

islet of Yeronisos, ‘Holy Island’ –

set today in that special, placid blue.

Folk tales have Greeks, after the fall of Troy

and exiled from home, land there and build

a temple to Apollo. Excavations

suggest the sanctuary was founded

by Cleopatra for Caesarion,

her son by Julius Caesar, the heir

she hoped, to Rome – Apollo being the god

of archery, knowledge, medicine, plague.

A few miles south on what, before the hotels

and villas came, was a deserted shore,

Colonel Grivas, Greek Cypriot ‘hero’

or ‘terrorist’, landed one November night

in ’54 to expel the British.

 

The restaurant is packed with middle class

local families in their Palm Sunday best.

After our mezze, fish fresh from the harbour,

we tourist St George’s church along the cliff –

a modern chapel-sized basilica

with its own square and drinking fountain.

We light a candle, as we always do,

more ‘good deed in a naughty world’ than faith.

A steady footfall of true believers

kisses the glass fronted icon of the saint.

A votive pink baby doll hangs from it.

Fifty yards inland, where there are ruins

of a Roman city, is a medieval shrine

to the saint – once a prayerful place for those,

Greek or Muslim, before Partition,

seeking love or strayed goats and donkeys.

 

On the fountain is a crude mosaic

of the Roman Soldier/Christian Martyr

slaying a dragon with its devil’s breath –

in Palestine, perhaps, or Syria.

Three leagues south is Aphrodite’s Rock

where the goddess was born among the spume.

Nowhere full of myth and history,

of irony and contradiction,

delineated by paint on wood

or finds in the earth or words in the air

is far from here over the bluest,

most changeable of seas.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

AMONG THE RUSSIANS

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

A week before Easter our Cyprus hotel

hosted the season’s last two conferences –

‘Moscow Niardmedic’, ‘Nestlé in Russia’.

The spacious, tiled, white walled lounge, the free bars,

the terraces with pergolas were filled

with Big Pharma salespersons on a jolly –

the many ethnicities of Russia,

all seemingly impassive, inscrutable,

seemingly suspicious of strangers.

 

April 3rd on the St Petersburg metro

a bomb was detonated between stations…

April 7th the US Sixth Fleet,

below the horizon due south from here,

launched its missiles against Syria…

That afternoon an Uzbek exile

drove a lorry at a crowd in Stockholm…

 

One evening, in the resident pianist’s break,

a Russian improvised – then played a slow,

soft melody all his compatriots knew.

They sang sotto voce, suffusing the space

with a wistful murmur.

 

 

 

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POETRY

DYSTOPIA: A WORK IN PROGRESS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.9K views

When the British and the French almost

literally drew lines in the sand

to divvy up the Ottoman Empire –

tutored by romantic, wistful Arabists

at the Quai D’Orsay and the Foreign Office –

there was nothing left for the Yazidis,

the Druze, the Kurds… It was always about oil –

and then Sunni Arabs and Zionist Jews.

It is always about oil, diamonds,

timber, gold, slaves, coal — and useful idiots.

 

*

 

Saddam hanged, Gaddafi sodomized then shot.

Being careless about what you wish for

appears to bring bandits, to make Frankenstein

monsters out of mercenaries, assassins

out of mujahideen. Better perhaps

the secret police, with pensionable jobs,

than unofficial executioners?

Better restriction than chaos, repression

than havoc? Better to live in servitude

since death ends all chance of liberty?

 

*

 

The democratic chancellories

of Europe, its communes and councils are

panders soliciting votes from racists

to prostitute the body politic.

They make virtue of prevarication

and casuistry; extol cohesion

and nationhood; plead penury –

yet erect frontiers of razor wire

and bomb far-fetched ideologies,

making accidental martyrs and migrants.

 

*

Does only a fool or knave decry

the efficacy of aerial bombing?

Do only knaves or fools advocate peace?

Do only both call, ‘Follow the money!

It’s all about oil!’? Will it always be

about oil – until the earth has become

one unrelenting desert, one vast sea

and there is no one to care about money?

Tetchy, ironic, rhetorical

questions give no shelter, change nothing.

 

*

 

It is about oil and useful innocents

seeking exile, seeking sanctuary.

They run from the bullets at the border –

anonymous children, young men, women

in labour, grandmas – or wait, patiently

for the most part, as if despair were a crime,

as if anger were a fault, in the rain

and the smoke, or, duped, drown in silence.

Theirs has become a name, whoever they are,

to conjure pity and heart break – or lies.

 

 

 

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