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Vietcong

POETRY

EXCEPTIONALISM

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

The Japanese Imperial Army’s

mistreatment of POWs

during World War II was a war crime.

The killing of Japanese civilians

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

by the United States Army Air Force

was a geopolitical strategy.

 

Daily, on the tv screen, out of the sky

suffering comes: dust, flames, detritus,

outcries – and the living burdened, fleeing…

 

…Myanmar, Baghdad, Grozny, the fall

of Paris – long lines of people south

on the roads through the fields of the Beauce,

trying to scatter at the siren sound

of a Stuka bomber beginning its dive…

 

…as armies retreat or advance, casual

atrocities, private massacres

randomly uncovered, indicted,

transmogrified if necessary

by statecraft’s convenient amnesia…

 

I used to believe that if there had been

24/7 Live Updates from

No-Man’s-Land on the Western Front

or the VC tunnels in the forests

of Vietnam those conflicts would not have

lasted a week – but now I am not so sure

for someone, somewhere is gaining glory,

telling lies, making money out of this

the simple immorality of war.

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments1 min read2.6K views

Impelled by Wall Street and the Pentagon,

and the vanity of Presidents,

the astronauts had seemed to sail beyond

experience – but we TV millions watched

live ‘Old Glory’ stiffen above us;

heard Nixon speak; saw Aldrin at attention.

Meanwhile, oblivious, the Vietcong

were waiting patiently in their tunnels.

 

***

 

The day of the moon landing we walked up

Bidston Hill to the Observatory,

where my great grandfather – who had captained

coffin ships to Boston – in his old age

studied the tides. Our little girl played on slabs

of ice-smoothed sandstone, and recited

‘The moon has a face like the clock in the hall’.

Birkenhead below lay sharply in sunlight –

maritime, sooty, long in decline.

 

***

 

Above the scrofulous cities of the earth

the contraptions spin like discarded coins.

We are trashing the universe, and time

is no shorter than it ever was for us

of the broken countries, which corrupt,

like mouths of rotten teeth, all they encroach.

 

 

Note: ‘SAME OLD, SAME OLD’ is a re-working of ‘NEW HEROES’ written in August and September 1969 – first published in Phoenix (Winter 1972) and re-published in Elsewhere (1973).

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SURVEILLANCE

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

A police helicopter hovers above

my house, flailing the air, its thrumming

outlawing conversation, even thought.

Perhaps they are observing the druggies, dealers,

who gather round the BT kiosk

by the nearby park, and then scatter,

like the Vietcong, when they hear the rotors.

 

The police will have my scowling mugshot –

as I glare upwards at this wasteful,

pointless, harassing jolly at my expense –

to add to all those other dissenting acts

recorded against my name at NSA

and GCHQ: for example,

supporting the ANC while apartheid ruled,

and now tagging ‘Cuba’, the war on terror’,

‘drones’, ‘Waziristan’ in my posted poems.

 

Why be surprised? If we employ spies,

to justify their pay they will find secrets,

which, by definition, are meant to be

private but which are not, per se, wrong.

While metadata clouds in the outskirts

of Cheltenham – costing so much money,

employing so much talent – thousands

of people, elderly like me but poor,

die each year of hypothermia

unregarded.

 

 

 

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