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the Great Hunger

POETRY

THE SKELETON ARMY OF STEVEN STREET

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2.1K views

Each Sunday the Salvationists would gather

at St Giles Cemetery – once the site

of a medieval leper hospital

set well beyond Chester’s city limits.

To the thud of the bass drum, to chords of brass,

to banners declaiming ‘Be just, and fear not!’,

to the singing of ‘A friend of Jesus,

O what bliss!’, uniformed they would march

onwards to a ‘Stronghold of Satan’ –

past the spot where, high above the river,

a Protestant and a Catholic

were burned to death a century apart.

 

Beside the canal, near the abattoir,

steam mill and lead works, was a purpose-built

enclave of constricted streets of back-to-back

lodging houses, public houses, gin shops.

Steven Street – perhaps three yards across

and fifty long – was the centre of the slum,

and home to hundreds of Irish Catholics

who were refugees from the Great Hunger.

 

The Salvation Army would march past the cramped,

noisome ghetto along the canal path

to ‘O boundless salvation!’. One Sunday, ‘Black

Sunday’, an ecumenical group

of English and Irish, Catholics

and non-Catholics – probably outrageously

drunk, as well as outrageously poor –

waited for the parade to pass by

the canal end of Steven Street, then followed

the last rank – mocking the hymns, hurling abuse,

dead rats, stones, and unfurling a raggedy

banner with a scrawled skull and crossbones.

Some Salvationists were seriously

assaulted, needing medical attention –

but the magistracy, concerned for Chester’s

tourist trade, considered the Sally Army

provocative, so bound over

the Steven Street ‘generals’ to keep the peace,

despite green-ink letters to the local press

railing against Fenians and Popery.

 

That year the British sent forty thousand troops

to land at Alexandria and invade

the Suez Canal Zone, the canal itself

being supposedly under threat. Steven Street –

or, rather, its straitened dwellings – was demolished

when I was a young man, and replaced with a block

of social housing. About twenty feet

of narrow road way, barely a car’s width,

remains – but not much else has changed: lives crippled

by accident, and the self-interest

of others; lives abridged by class, and want,

and bigotry; whole nations hoodwinked

by wonders and marvels, by abstractions;

consumed, diminished by avarice.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE ATLANTIC ARCHIPELAGO

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read2.4K views

It is an archipelago of small lakes,

streams, and rivers. I watch black headed gulls

at low tide flock westwards, seawards,

following the water courses – where eels

and salmon thrived – to the vast estuaries

of the Dee and the Mersey barely a league

apart. Rains – falling on the Welsh Mountains

and the Peak District, on Rowton Heath and Chat Moss,

on the Wirral Peninisula that divides

the two rivers’ mouths – comingle forever

in the Irish Sea with currents from the south,

the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico.

 

When I was a child the map was a picture

of an old man with hair wild in the wind,

his nose sharp, his jutting chin, riding a pig,

and following, chasing a large balloon.

Now I see the long North Atlantic seas

founder on the rocky, indented coasts

of Ireland and the Hebrides to merge,

north of Cape Wrath, between the Orkneys

and Shetland, into continental waters,

breaking from the North Sea and the Channel

on atlased cliffs and strands, on endless inlets

and promontories, perpetual coasts.

 

This archipelago of six thousand

surprising, shifting islands – for the most part

uninhabited by human beings,

still mostly green from space in daylight –

abounds with saints’ names, and with hallowed places.

Yet how the English aka Normans,

Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts

took the name of Jesus Christ in vain

so as to scourge their nearest neighbours –

Oliver Cromwell at Drogheda,

William III at Glencoe – nowhere

too small or modest for lethal bigotry!

Later the English anglicized the place names

in Celtic lands. Their army engineers

built single track bridges in the Highlands

so gun carriages could cross, and surveyed

the entire kingdom in case of uprisings.

 

The chalky, pebbly English Channel ports

appear to have been stuck strategically

on England’s rump so our masters may face down,

with florid rhetoric, through sunshine

and moonlight, mist and storm, perfidious

foreigners in occasional dinghies.

Yet here are infinite coasts of landfall:

Celtic warriors, Roman villas,

Saxon kingdoms, Viking settlements,

Norman castles, French speaking courtiers,

Latin in law courts and cathedrals,

and German dynasties on the throne!

 

The Celts were harried westwards into Wales.

There were Highland Clearances, the Great Hunger,

and English Enclosures of common land.

Wherever there were forests they were felled

to build ships. Wherever there were valleys

and streams floors of clattering, rumbling looms

were built. Wherever there was coal the earth

was torn open, and its history burned.

Canals were dug, iron rails laid, roads tarmacked,

and cities – with their civic halls, their squares,

museums, libraries, and back-to-back slums –

grew large on the Slave Trade and Empire,

as the English with their aiders and abetters

coloured the atlas pink with murder and greed.

When it all fell apart, they invited those

who had been servants and slaves to take jobs

in the archipelago, work the natives

would not or could not do. So the cities

have become celebrations of diversity,

testaments to there being one human race.

How the self-pitying nativists hate that!

What should be a welcoming commonwealth

is riven with squabbling, petty abstractions,

exploited by would-be demagogues,

and media-megaphoned by aged billionaires –

spiteful, mendacious citizens of nowhere!

 

I saw, one early August afternoon

on Lindisfarne aka Holy Island,

a tidal island off England’s north east coast,

home once of St Aidan and St Cuthbert –

a coach party from Newcastle about

to disembark. There were children, mothers,

grandmas – the women in hijabs. Suddenly

a cold sea mist – known locally as a haar

from the Middle Dutch for a cold, sharp wind –

blew in from the North Sea. They shook their heads,

sighed, laughed, and, speaking Urdu and English,

got back on the bus to have their picnic

in the warm and dry, bright mist swirling round them.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE WEIRD SISTERS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.2K views

Since only the victors – usually men –

get to write history, so the renown

of the poet and of the painter, Willie

and Jack Yeats, has almost totally

obscured the sisters’, Lolly and Lily,

and their Cuala Press: from an era

when misogyny was even more

commonplace than now, and most members

of either gender accepted it.

 

They published new work only – all set

and printed by hand by a female workforce:

Willy’s poems, of course, and Jack’s graphics,

J.M. Synge, Oliver St John Gogarty.

They were one of the keys to the Celtic

Revival; recasting the South, the Free State,

Eire, the Republic of Ireland;

erasing the simian images

of the centuries’ of uprisings,

and the skeletal icons of the Famine.

 

The literary editor was their big brother.

The Press was frequently in the red

with cash flow problems, which the bank manager

seemed to believe resulted entirely

from a business run and owned by women.

William would grudgingly settle the debts

when he had cash to spare, like the Nobel Prize,

seeming to forget that the hard work

of his unmarried sisters had financed

the whole Yeats’ household – father, mother, siblings –

during crucial years of near penury.

Almost the last book they printed was

Patrick Kavanagh’s long and angry poem,

The Great Hunger, published during World War 2,

about Paddy Maguire, loveless, childless,

farming the unrelenting fields of Armagh.

 

The Yeats sisters, who had always wished

to live separately but were forced

to share the same dwellings throughout their lives,

share the same grave and simple headstone

in St Nahi’s Church of Ireland graveyard,

Dundrum, now a suburb of Dublin –

with the largest shopping centre in Ireland –

a village when the sisters lived there.

 

Lily and Lolly have been immortalised

in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Buck Mulligan,

holding court in the Martello Tower,

remarks: ‘Five lines of text and 10 pages

of notes about the folk and fishgods of Dundrum.

Printed by the weird sisters in the big wind’.

Was it tact, or misogynistic

disdain, kept them unnamed?

 

 

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POETRY

FROM AGINCOURT TO MARIUPOL

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K views

Much of the history of modern Europe,

from Agincourt to Mariupol,

seems to comprise ignorant, arrogant

purportedly Christian armies – some ragged,

most well financed – advancing, retreating,

slaughtering innocents, telling lies,

with brief respites for rearmament,

and victory’s parades and revenges.

 

Even respectable men who should know

better, scholars and poets, politicos

and hacks, pretend to be soldiers, to ‘Hear

the drums of morning play. Hark the empty

highways crying “Who’ll beyond the hills away?”‘

They broadcast the recruiting sergeant’s drum roll –

for volunteers to step up and play

one of humankind’s most ancient games,

border disputes and the massing of troops.

 

The Soviets created the famine

in Ukraine, as the British did in Ireland,

to chasten the natives, remove them.

Such holodomors need not just a Peel,

a Russell, snug in 10 Downing Street,

or a Stalin, secure in the Kremlin –

choosing which omelettes are on the menu,

which eggs, and how many, should be broken –

but hierarchies of aiders and abetters,

dutiful enablers of iniquity.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

GOLDEN

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.8K views

As luck would have it, we were married this day

exactly half a century ago.

We holiday with our small family

to avoid the inevitable party

and announce our golden wedding to friends

via Facebook – and receive some humbling

encouragements that speak not simply

of being there like pebbles as the tide

ebbs and flows but of inspiration.

 

We chose to honeymoon by Bantry Bay.

Ireland spoke of mystery and romance –

to us ignorant of its privations.

As we drove through the town that August Sunday,

the sun lowering over the Atlantic,

some church festival was finishing.

A wedding guest had hidden confetti

in our suitcase so, as you unpacked our clothes

for the first time, gaudy paper disks fluttered

over the bed beneath The Sacred Heart.

Our week was ended with upset stomachs.

We had had lunch – potatoes, carrots, bacon –

in a dark panelled restaurant in Cork,

surrounded by unsmiling nuns and priests.

We were infidels in Calvary land.

 

On the return ferry, to save money,

we spent the night in armchairs in the bar.

Before midnight a gale blew up that rolled us

forty five degrees starboard to port and back.

We could see ships nearby in Liverpool Bay

bucking as in a cartoon of a tempest.

Behind the bar’s locked grills, glasses and bottles

shattered. Bench seats along the saloon’s sides

broke free and two lines of strangers grinning

with fear briefly curtsied to each other.

 

‘Strange to be there, beginning something new,’

I wrote that autumn. ‘Strange to go there,

hoping for what might come.’ The narrow fields

and lanes seemed untouched since the Great Hunger –

yet the dry stone walls were festooned for miles

with wild fuchsia and honeysuckle. Now

it seems as if we had known that we would learn there

how to weather sickness, storms – and bask in joy.

 

 

 

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