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The Somme

POETRY

THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments1 min read2.2K views

For John Plummer

 

‘History is a people’s memory.’ Malcolm X

 

It is VE Day. Though those who still survive –

the eye witnesses – tell angrily of waste

not sacrifice, what should have been a day

of the dead, and the maimed, and the displaced

worldwide is here one of tea parties, sing-songs –

while the toll mounts as if it were the first day

of the Somme. They lied then. They are lying now –

with entitlement’s clipped inflexions,

with the easy rhetoric of privilege,

the sound of the discrete shibboleths

of power and class, the sound their money makes –

lying about the future and the past,

lying about the sick and the dead.

If you are poor, or old, or brown, or black

you will suffer sooner, and die alone.

 

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A TERRIBLE PLACE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

Posing for the camera’s long exposure,

his right foot firmly on the sledge, in bone

numbing, heart contracting temperatures,

was perhaps what brought that look into Scott’s eyes.

And the eyes always have it: his say,

I do not want to be here. Maybe that’s

twenty-twenty hindsight since we know

how it ends, with all the heroes dead.

 

Once this seemed to me a simple tale

of jingoism, derring do, class and

sacrifice, a prequel to The Somme.

Now, it’s all about him. That look speaks

of the loneliness of leadership,

the courage of enduring duty.

He was the last to die; his log’s last entry,

‘For God’s sake look after our people!’;

the last he saw of the world the tent’s

beating canvas lashed by the howling wind.

 

 

 

Note: The poem was first published in A JAR OF STICKLEBACKS – http://www.armadillocentral.com/authors/david-selzer.

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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