Archive for August, 2009
4th AUGUST 1944
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 21st, 2009
Anne Frank
The canal dapples the office ceiling.
Upstairs, the fugitives are still as dust.
A siren unpeoples the city.
Into the waiting sky, with the raucous gulls
and the chestnut, her words like breathing…Her life
has turned, beyond all her desires, so
brutally to art…They packed and waited:
beyond, a locked compartment to themselves
and telephone wires curvetting by -
then countrysides of shuddering, noisome wagons.
She died alone. Her father made her grief,
her love public as Europe: spoke her words
into the empty sky.
A NEIGHBOURHOOD OF STRANGERS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 21st, 2009
Buzzards splayed their wingtips against the sun.
A Phantom entered the glacial valley,
its fuselage burning – the pilot
and crewman still at the controls, their choice made.
In school, it was story time – magical
oak woods, changelings secreted. The children
heard a rushing like oceans. Their teacher
saw the fire approach and two young men,
with a hundred years of technology,
burst upon the huddled village’s
common land…Children dreamt of foreign men
gone to dust in a golden fire for a
neighbourhood of strangers.
LA PIÈTA
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 21st, 2009
St Peter's Square, Bernini's colonnades, The Basilica 1910
of the known world – of hewn porphyry,
of granite kept in its place, of usury.
Irony turns each illuminated page,
celebrates the dissemination
of the word, funds the seeding of Europe
beyond oceans, in jungle, across pampas,
over sierra. Only the clash of
vultures and the seas’ predictable tides
can erase carrion from argent sands.
How light the Saviour is! The Virgin seems
to hold him with such ambivalent ease:
a supplicant offering a sacrifice,
a rescuer carrying a corpse.
Michelangelo's Pieta, St Peter's Basilica
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