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Wounded Knee

POETRY

IN DEFENCE OF WHATABOUTERY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K 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

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read1.9K views

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – tale

of adultery and obsession –

was published in 1850. In the year

the Crimean War began, he became

the U.S. Consul in Liverpool,

a post gifted by his friend the President.

He did not like the job despite the fees

from the cargoes of cotton and molasses

hoisted ashore. Whether in a Hansom cab

home to his family in lodgings in the town,

on the steam ferry to the rented villa

in the gated park on the Wirral,

or on the train to the rented house

on Southport’s Esplanade he felt too close

to the piratical-looking tars,

who washed up on the consulate steps.

 

His friend, Herman Melville – whose Moby Dick (tale

of arrogance and obsession) was published

in 1851 – had once been

a young sailor lost in the town’s quayside stews.

When he and his family did the Grand Tour

they set off from Liverpool, staying a week

with the Hawthornes in Southport. One evening

the writers took their cigars among the dunes

and, facing west across the twilight waves

of Liverpool Bay, spoke of providence,

eternity. Courageous innovators

that they were, no doubt each secretly,

that night, thought the other might have penned

the supreme fiction of their elusive land.

But the dark fields of the Republic

were rolling towards them – Little Bighorn

and Wounded Knee, Shiloh and Gettysburg.

 

 

 

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