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Tiber

POETRY

AT THE BRIDGE

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read783 views

When I was poorly my mother read to me

from Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’:

Then out spoke brave Horatius, the Captain

of the Gate: “To every man upon

this earth, death cometh soon or late; And how

can man die better than facing fearful odds…”

He lived, was gifted land, and made in bronze.

 

But what I remember from those sickly days

is an image of the Captain, sword drawn,

and his two comrades. Behind them,

a second line of defence, they had fired

the only bridge across the Tiber.

Their duty was to stay the baying hordes

charging down the hillside towards them.

I see them now, three figures in a fiery

valley filled with flickering shadows,

waiting for the enemy.

 

 

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POETRY

ANGELS AND VANDALS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read434 views

Everywhere in central Rome is sentient:

the Coliseum; St Peter’s Square;

the Spanish Steps; Castel Sant’ Angelo –

a towering, cylindrical building,

originally the Emperor Hadrian’s

mausoleum then a bolt hole for besieged

popes and, finally, for centuries,

a prison, and place of execution,

before becoming a museum.

 

We are approaching the castle this New Year’s Day

across the Ponte Sant Angelo, with its

ten sculptured, twice life-size, Baroque angels.

Beneath the Angel With The Crown Of Thorns

are three Roma children, a boy and two girls,

the latter dressed in long multi-coloured skirts,

their hair hidden by tightly wrapped scarves.

While the older girl begs,  the other two

are lighting some kindling they have brought.

 

The Castel Sant Angelo is the setting

for the final act of Puccini’s ‘Tosca’.

While Napoleon’s army is advancing –

so Rome will be sacked yet again –

Tosca, a famous soprano, stabs

the lecherous Scarpia, Chief of Police.

She thinks she has tricked him into saving

her lover – but the bullets the firing squad

discharges in the prison yard are real

and Cavaradossi, a painter, dies.

In her grief she sings, ‘O Scarpia,

avanti a dio!’, then runs up the steps

to the parapet – where we are standing –

and throws herself over the ramparts.

We can see the snow on the Apennines,

the Tiber flowing fast and olive below,

and, on the bridge, two armed policemen chasing

the children, whose small bonfire is blazing now.

 

 

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POETRY

TEATRO DEI RIUNITI

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read473 views

The Tiber’s olive waters curve past

Umbertide or, rather, the town curves

to the river in this limpid valley

alive with oak trees, willows, poplars

and millennia of settlements,

monuments – Etruscan, Roman, Lombard.

 

To impede the German’s retreat northwards,

the Allies bombed the bridge across the river

successfully and, collaterally,

razed a block of tall, narrow houses –

and many of their inhabitants.

 

The house numbers are brass inlaid in the setts

of what is now a car park in this

medieval town with its Via Papa

Giovanni XXIII, its Via

Kennedy, its Piazza Carlo Marx.

 

The Eighth Army built a bailey bridge

on the ancient arches – which was still there

when we performed Shakespeare, in English,

at the theatre. Unused and derelict

because of the war, the baroque theatre

was renovated by an alliance

of Communists and Christian Democrats,

I Riuniti. It had been a gift

from the town’s most famous son, Domenico

Bruni, a castrato, emasculated

for the usual reasons – poverty, greed.

A celebrity acclaimed and enriched,

he sang in Rome, Naples, Milan, London

and St Petersburg for Catherine the Great.

 

He might have stood by the deep canal

that channels the winter torrents through the town

from the mountains into the Tiber.

Our play was The Comedy of Errors,

in which one of the lads from Syracuse says,

‘He that commends me to mine own content

Commends me to the thing I cannot get.’

 

 

 

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POETRY

VIRTUALLY BIRDLESS IN ASSISI

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read354 views

For Sarah:  always a conservationist, latterly a twitcher.

 

i

 

In Umbria – the cuore verde of pristine, wooded hills,

Orvieto’s honey-pale wines,

the paintings of Perugino and Pisano,

the Tiber’s milky jade,

tartufo nero –

they stew thrush.

 

ii

 

At least once in our suburban garden,

house sparrow, green finch, ring-necked dove, wren,

jay, wood pigeon, robin, starling,  swift,  jackdaw, blue tit,

magpie,  blackbird, sparrow hawk, chaffinch, swallow,

gold crest, bull  finch, great tit, hen harrier, mistle thrush

have, variously, courted, mated, nested, birthed, ate, shat,  killed,

bobbed, waddled, hopped, walked, pecked, fluttered, shrieked,

whistled, warbled, squawked and died.

 

iii

 

But, above all, sang – that esoteric music,

rich and varied as their plumage:

untutored, uncultivated, unstinting.

 

 iv

 

Though only crows circle St. Francis’ basilica,

in Cheshire ostriches are farmed.

How accidents of diet, doctrine, sentiment and flag

determine extinction!

 

 

 

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