Archive for June, 2009
PARISH CHURCH, BURFORD
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on June 22nd, 2009
Hear them, silent on the leads,
watching their comrades,
the ensign, the corporal and the private
shot by firing squad
amongst the elms in the graveyard below.
Under the leaves in the summer,
Cromwell’s New Model Army
was practising democracy,
selecting all ranks for exemplary death -
the only leveller.
WE PRISONERS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on June 22nd, 2009
A lark starting from the heather; a lamb
amazed by a heron; a hare gutted
at a turn in the road; the familiar path
obscured by fern, bramble, convolvulus:
the gallery in my head is open
all hours – by turns, thriving and derelict.
The sparrow in my chest, where my heart lay,
now flings itself at broken panes, now stills.
At the end of the pier, where steamships docked,
black-headed gulls and anglers watch and wait.
The steel-faced laughing man will read our stars.
Under the planking, the jelly fish glide.
My heart is a fist clenched in darkness,
a sea-anemone in coral waters.
LOST
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on June 22nd, 2009
After the fluorescent shops and the snatched music,
the side street was damp and dark -
but a bag of chips and a manipulative adult
made the emptiness freedom.
Waterways were trawled and the usual,
time-dishonoured suspects questioned.
Down river, high tides returned her nine year old body.
The funeral cortège was a carriage and horses
and the local press was effulgent.
But gossip condemned her single mother,
living in a hostel on benefit.
The killer lived two floors down,
an estranged father of daughters -
a violent drunk, unemployed, unschooled.
Victim, mother and murderer
threaten the equivocal city.
Losers and losing
challenge its achievements.
Death is only one result of murder.
Remember sweet Fanny Adams – mutilated,
immortalised, profaned unthinkingly!
The murder and rape of children
seem beyond words, understanding, iniquity
- and another’s lack of love or the means to love
is out of our grasp, lost beyond finding.
CHILDREN’S HOUR
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on June 22nd, 2009
About teatime, when the coals were glowing
liquid orange and cream, strands of soot
would catch on the fireback,
flickering like torches in a forest.
And behind the wireless’ fretwork facade
the valves were alight with Uncles and Aunties,
soothing, articulate, evocative and refined,
bringing us safely to the Weather and the News.
We listened to the same wonders, you and I,
tuned the static and the soot to pre-pubescent stories,
sensing there was something else
beyond the sideboard.
What if we could have been told -
by a clairvoyant Romany perhaps? -
that, out in the ether,
there was someone we would want to love forever.
EZRA POUND IN VENICE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on June 22nd, 2009
‘But the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.’ Ezra Pound
Sitting in a traghetto, Olga Rudge
from Ohio and Ezra Pound from
Idaho – together fifty years,
from concert violinist to poet’s helpmate,
poet maker to fascist propagandist,
he, typically, with stick, wide brimmed hat,
floppy collar, she, wearing woollen gloves,
left hand clutching a large, canvas bag, right hand
a carefully folded scarf, dressed, like any
elderly woman, for a chilly day -
look away separately into the distance.
Five years before Pound’s death, Allen Ginsberg,
from New Jersey, on a sort of Grand Tour,
kissed him on the cheek and forgave him,
on behalf of the Jews, for his ‘mistake’.
‘Do you accept my blessing?’ asked Allen.
‘I do’, said Ezra. What closure! What chutzpah!
Held in a cage in Pisa, lit day and night,
jeered at as a traitor and a coward
by GIs who had battled from the south,
he wrote: ‘What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross’.
'The Rhinoceros', Pietro Longhi, Venice, 1702-1785
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