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POETRY

LIVERPOOL, 3RD MAY 1941

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read466 views

This is one of the great public, civic

spaces of the world – the museum,

the library, the gallery, the court house,

Wellington’s column, the Steble fountain,

the Empire Theatre, Lime Street Station,

St George’s Hall,  St John’s Gardens, vistas

of the river, the Wirral, the Welsh hills…

 

During the worst raid of the Liverpool Blitz

the museum was set ablaze – a bomb,

one of so many, supposedly

for the docks, that razed history, neighbourhoods.

My grandmother, Liverpool Welsh – who took tea

with Buffalo Bill and was offered a place

in a music hall chorus line but refused,

being the eldest of thirteen, her Da

at sea and her Ma at the sherry –

described to me in detail many times

the natural history collection:

stuffed walruses, condors and Don Pedro,

a retired Barnum and Bailey elephant –

all immolated, and washed away.

 

While mummy, daddy, grandma see ‘Evita’,

she and I make our way to the museum,

holding hands. I talk about history,

public and personal – my father,

a stranger, a London Jew, in transit

that May Saturday, joining a line

of desperate buckets. She listens –

in my company a serious,

concerned seven year old – and asks if fires

can ever be put out. ‘Yes, always…

eventually,’ I say. We decide

to explore as many floors as we can

from the top – space, dinosaur poo, bugs

but have no time for masks and totems –

and pause, me for rest, her to draw,

before, leaving a moment for ice cream,

we walk in the dusk, past the statues,

up the incline to the theatre crowds.

 

 

Note: first published April 2017.

 

 

 

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POETRY

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read591 views

Snapped black and white in Kodak Verichrome,

more than seventy years ago, by an aunt

with a Kodak Brownie, I am supine

in a small pram. The park’s avenue

of lime trees in leaf suggests May

and therefore me, coverless, five months.

My fingers are clasped and bare feet are crossed,

like an effigy’s or a lounge lizard’s.

I am awake and eyeing the camera,

through half-shut lids, like an insulted

potentate – or an about-to-be-mardy

baby.  Behind me, in the distance,

is the spire of the Victorian

sandstone parish church, in the middle ground

tennis courts and someone serving.

 

Beside me, in sharp focus (on a bench

with concrete ends and wooden slats, ‘There’s-

a-war-on-you-know’ weeds burgeoning

beneath it) my mother, a handsome woman

with rich, auburn hair, a war widow since March –

her ancestors Welsh seafarers, some drowned,

some landlocked.  She is almost smiling.

 

Most days, in all seasons, we walk the park,

an Edwardian legacy, named

for Queen Alexandra, a fashionista

mother of six, a loather of Prussians –

being a daughter of a Danish king –

and disabled over time by her deafness,

then slowly losing speech and memory.

We talk of the present – how our daughter laughed

on the swings and now her daughter does.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY, SAN LAZZARO, VENICE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read619 views

San Lazzaro island was the city’s

leper colony until the Doge

gave the Armenians sanctuary, no doubt

to annoy the Turks. An antique engraved print

of the monastery, which occupies

the whole island, hangs on the wall above

the small table I use for my laptop.

The monks did the engraving and print.

Their library is Alexandrian in scope.

 

Gordon Lord Byron, escaping the

blandishments of Shelley’s sister-in-law,

took an apartment on the Grand Canal,

in the Palazzo Mocenigo-Nero,

with his attendants – including dog, fox,

wolf and monkey – for two hundred pounds

a year. As always bored and curious,

he visited San Lazzaro, learned

Armenian and helped with translations.

 

The second book of poetry I owned was

a hand-me-down, leather bound, well read,

complete works of Byron – my mother’s father’s.

He was dead of a heart attack years

before my birth: Welsh, from Swansea, bit of a

bully, a whisky drinker, a bibliophile,

a bombardier badly wounded at Mons,

a Post Office Telegram Manager,

a travelling classified ads salesman.

 

I have the other books that survived his

middle daughter’s arson of this auto-

didact’s library:  BP’s ‘The Matabele

Campaign 1896’, ‘The Greatest

Show on Earth,’ ‘The Makers of Florence’, Wilde’s

‘Salomé’, with the Beardsley graphics, a first edition,

‘The Story of Atlantis.’ Imperialist,

circus master, aesthete, voyeur, dreamer,

he died in a boarding house near Altrincham.

 

We caught the 15.10 vaporetto, watched

the white campanile with its onion

cupola draw near. The boat slowed, rolled

in the swell, engines into reverse

with a roar of gears. The tour encompassed

printing press (‘per souvenir’), church, library.

In one corridor, I smelt meat cooking, glanced

through an open window. In the kitchen yard

below, the monks were playing 5-a-side.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE HEREDITARY PRINCIPLE

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read603 views

Hugh d’Avranches, one of the Conqueror’s henchmen,

with him at Hastings, got the Saxon earldom

of Chester and the palatine of Cheshire,

with its forests of deer and boar, as reward.

His nicknames were ‘Lupus’ and ‘Gros Veneur’

because he ravened the Welsh like a wolf

and he was a hunter and a glutton.

 

His descendant, Gerald Grosvenor, His Grace,

the late, sad 6th Duke of Westminster – holder

of twenty eight appointments, decorations,

medals, orders and titles, many bestowed

by the Queen; landlord of much of London’s

Belgravia and Mayfair, where dwell

Arab despots, Russian oligarchs

and celebrities from showbiz and fashion;

his motto being ‘Virtus Non Stemma’,

‘Virtue Not Pedigree’ – had riches

greater than the combined wealth of six

million of his poorest, fellow subjects.

And we are all, everyone of us, subjects

of Her Majesty. What a great leveller

our constitutional monarchy is!

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE EDGE OF HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read531 views

From the holiday cottage near the top

of Allt Goch Bach – Little Red Hill – west

and south is ancient woodland of ash, oak,

beech and holly. North, down the steep incline,

is Beaumaris – with its redundant castle,

gaol and quays, its narrow streets and low,

thick walled houses. East are the Menai Straits,

the A55 and the Carnedd range.

 

Some say the ‘red’ was the blood of the last

of the Druids – or the Royalists.  Now

the hill is covered with spacious ‘80s

bespoke bungalows for wealthy pensioners.

From here, there is a landscape of invasion:

Roman, Saxon, Viking, Plantagenet

(Norse, of course, by any other name) –

and, last, the so-called ‘English’ (residents

and tourists), accidental imperialists.

Inland, Welsh thrives. Here, it is seldom heard.

 

On Sundays, stray notes and chords from the town’s

brass band drift up – Italian opera,

a Methodist hymn. I cherish this place:

the hill; the town; the changing beauty,

shapes and colours of the tidal straits

and treeless mountains; the sense of being

always on the edge of history.

Where I live, over the mountains, far away,

is now a disunited kingdom – violent,

corrupt, gangrenous with injustice and greed.

 

 

 

 


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POETRY

LAISSEZ FAIRE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read507 views

‘Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.’ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.

 

I am contemplating, in the Walker Art Gallery,

Liverpool, the statue of William Huskisson, once

the city’s Tory MP and sometime President of the Board of Trade

but much better known as the world’s first railway fatality

at the opening of the line to fetch cotton quickly and cheaply

from the Mersey’s docks to the mills of South East Lancashire.

(He died at Eccles, where the cakes come from).

His widow paid for the sculpture. He holds a scroll

and is dressed as a Roman senator. He is a tad

more lithe than in later life – or death – and his thinning hair

has been carved to indicate maturity rather than age.

(The vandalised statue was removed from his mausoleum

in St James’ Cemetery). He was hit by Stevenson’s Rocket,

while ingratiating himself with Wellington, the Iron Duke

and old Etonian, famous for the observation

that  Waterloo ‘was won on the playing fields of Eton’.

 

The gallery is part of a vast piazza-type space

of splendidly grandiose late Victorian constructs –

civic society made manifest in stone – Museum,

Library, Assizes, St John’s Gardens, St Georges’ Hall,

St George’s Plateau, Lime Street Station, inspired by local,

civic pride, funded by the Atlantic slave trade’s proceeds.

 

More or less round the corner is Scotland Road – the centre

once of working class migrant diversity: Irish, Welsh,

Scottish, Italian, German, Polish, English – its MP

until 1929, an Irish Nationalist –

its male workforce pre-dominantly dockers.  Post war

the river began to empty. Citizens of Liverpool’s slums

were scattered through Cheshire to places where

manual labour was needed – for a time. There their off-spring languish.

 

On St George’s Plateau, in 1911, was announced

a national seamen’s strike, which became a national transport strike.

Churchill telegrammed the King that the end of Empire was nigh.

The Hussars entered stage right, opened fire.

Two strikers died, both Catholics: John Sutcliffe, a carter,

shot twice in the head, Michael Prendergast, a docker, twice in the chest.

Working class men killing working class men so public school boys

could play in safety and nouveau riche tycoons

make dynastic fortunes for their children.

 

 

 

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