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Ukraine

POETRY

WORD & IMAGE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read247 views

‘Language is much closer to film than painting is.’

Sergei Eisenstein, A DIALECTICAL APPROACH TO FILM FORM

 

We are watching a subtitled crime series

taking place in Central European Time,

and set in the three Slavic, post-Soviet

cities of Odessa, Prague and Warsaw –

though when the three protagonist detectives

meet they must speak in English, entertainment’s

international lingua franca.

 

It is the usual tale of murders

and mobiles, of kidnapping and corruption,

where we may find, in the last reel, that we had

already spotted the villain in episode three

– that sinister photographer with sunken eyes,

and a Germanic surname, perhaps?

 

It is a series using stock shots like Warsaw’s

Palace of Culture & Science and Prague’s

Charles Bridge, and action taking place in cut-price

locations – except for this current scene

taking place on the Potemkin Stairs:

two hundred steps cut from grey-green sandstone

bordered with granite, forty feet at the top,

seventy at the foot, built in the reign of Tzar

Nicholas I, giving the Odessa

elite gracious access to the harbour,

and its cosmopolitan cargoes;

famous for the collage in BATTLESHIP

POTEMKIN of the baby carriage bouncing

down the steps through the carnage wrought by the Tzar’s

soldiers in their white caps and tunics;

a paragraph of silent terrors and distress,

each sentence an icon of horror.

 

In the scene we are now watching a witness

is being interviewed half way down the steps

by a Ukrainian detective.

Behind and above is a group of what

appear to be co-educational

sea cadets posing for selfies. Judging

from the manner of their movements they have been

recruited from a school of physical theatre.

The director presumably thought this

scene shot from at least two camera angles

a suitable homage to his predecessor,

the master, the maestro of montage,

one of its Soviet begetters.

 

The crime series was made, of course, before Russia

invaded Ukraine. However, and

nevertheless, by chance or design, the stairs –

with their iconic place in Russia’s public

memory – have remained untouched by war.

 

 

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POETRY

IN DEFENCE OF WHATABOUTERY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read514 views

There have been three anniversaries of note

so far this year: the first of the invasion

of Ukraine by the Russian Federation;

the twentieth of the invasion of Iraq

by the US, UK, Australia

and Poland; the fifty fifth of the My Lai

Massacre, the murder of five hundred

and two Vietnamese men, women, children –

all civilians – by a company

of American GIs. Aggressors

seem always only too able and willing

to justify such sociopathic

behaviour with self-serving casuistry

both before and after the fact. Remember

Oradour-sur-Glane; Amritsar; the

Armenian Massacres; Wounded Knee;

Alexander the Great destroying Thebes;

the Ancient Romans’ sacking Carthage

and killing tens of thousands; and Elisha,

on his way into the city of Bethel,

being met by a large group of little children,

who mocked him because of his bald head,

so he cursed them in the name of the Lord,

and two she-bears, emerging from a nearby wood,

tore forty two of the children to pieces.

 

 

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POETRY

FROM AGINCOURT TO MARIUPOL

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read821 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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POETRY

53 WILLIAM STREET

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read413 views

Our DNA is filled with wondrous

commonplaces, luminous platitudes:

refugees from pogroms in the Ukraine,

refugees from the Famine in Connaught.

*

This was the house my mother’s family moved to

from 7 Moses Street, off Sefton Park Road,

Liverpool, three years before she was born;

Ma, Da, her two small sisters, her two teenage

step brothers; a rented end of terrace –

with gas, running water, outside privy –

in a cobbled cul-de-sac, where bread

still warm was delivered in the Co-op’s

horse drawn van, and milk in a pony and trap

from a farm only half a mile away

(long gone now to semi-detached estates);

five years before Da was wounded at Mons,

and the lead gun carriage horse he rode was killed;

seven before the boys were gassed at Ypres

waiting at dawn to ‘go over the top’.

*

I have lived most of my longish life five minutes

from where my mother was born. Accidental

journeys – personal, ancestral – brought me here

to these streets, where no bombs have been dropped,

no invaders have marched, no citizens shot.

 

 

 

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