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Venus

POETRY

THE GATES OF MERCY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.7K views

‘…Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib’d alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind…’
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

 

When I was a pre-pubescent boy, I read
The Eagle – having graduated from
the seditious slapstick of The Beano
and The Dandy – a comic with Christian
values, though the masthead did not say so.
Its heroes were square-jawed with no moral flaws:
Dan Dare, Storm Nelson, PC 49,
Harris Tweed and Tommy Walls – ice cream
and woven cloth, such product placements!

The centre pages showed cutaways of
torpedo boats and aircraft carriers.
The prevalent villain was the Mekon
from Venus, with his hydrocephalic head,
riding some technological wizardry.
But worthiness would always triumph.
The lives of St Patrick and St Paul
featured, if I remember – citizens
of Rome and brothers in Christ triumphant.

I thought of those evolutionary charts,
beloved of late Victorians, showing
homo sapiens – upright, striding forth –
ascending left to right from ambling apes,
thought progress inevitable
when, adolescent and idealistic,
a young man and political, I believed
we could build Jerusalem, make it
as clean as Dan Dare’s London, make it
out of kindness and justice and children
ascending but we are slamming fast – even
unto the third and fourth generation –
the gates of mercy.

 

Note: The poem has been featured in ‘INTO AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE WITH DAN DARE’ – http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/into-uncertain-future-with-dan-dare.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=linkedin

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ADRIFT

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

Where part of the back wall of the scena

of the Greco-Roman amphitheatre

has collapsed, we can see the sun setting

on Etna, its smoke drifting like a veil

over the sea. The town’s orchestra –

of mandolins, lutes, guitars, double bass –

with its plangent, sentimental, heart-

rending timbre plays the prelude to act one

of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’…

 

We saw the opera at the Bolshoi –

with its gilt chairs and the Romanov box

with the hammer and the sickle above –

the month Vladimir Putin was first crowned.

When we left the theatre in the soft dusk

of May there was a babushka begging.

In the Lubyanka metro station,

a drunken man rolled down the escalator…

 

As Venus appears in the south east,

the orchestra plays encores – ‘Volare’,

‘Torna a Surriento’, ‘Ritorna-me’.

The audience, mostly local, largely

female, sways and hums, secure, for that moment,

in its campanilismo, thinking of amore…

 

Small boats are approaching, in the thickening

dark, from North Africa and the Levant,

chartered by men – vessels overladen with

women and children, craft whose landfall, whose

free fall will set tolling each and every

bell in the frantic campanile.

 

 

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POETRY

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read1.9K views

Curtains drawn against late October twilight,

working on verses about burgeoning flocks

of raucous, emerald Ring-necked Parakeets

in the Surrey Hills, I hear the murmur

of girls. It is Halloween. The bell rings.

There is a bevy of neighbours’ daughters –

one with a painted face, all on the cusp

of womanhood – lovely, ingenuous.

 

From habit, I watch them safely down the street

and then, before I shut the door, look up

at the night sky, craning my neck with wonder.

Cloud obscures all but Jupiter, Mars, Venus.

It would be tempting to believe not merely

in physical forces and chemical

reactions but design and purpose

through the kaleidoscope of the universe –

and in the countless stars’ unheard music.

 

After supper, I begin another piece:

about the Ghetto in Golden Prague –

with its learning, its music and its art –

which Hitler decreed should be preserved as

a raree show for ‘Judenrein Europa’.

Daily, new stones are placed on the tomb

of Rabbi Judah Levai ben Bezalel,

Talmudic scholar and Kabbalistic mystic,

legendary creator, from Vltava mud,

of The Golem to scourge the anti-semites,

and battler with Azrael, the angel of death,

to protect his only granddaughter.

 

***

 

In the opposite corner of the room

in which I write is an Edwardian

upright piano, an inanimate

companion since my early childhood.

Our granddaughter asks to be lifted

onto the too high stool and tries the notes,

now loud, now soft,  with the flats of her hands,

hearing with wonder the unending sounds.

 

 

 

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