Archive for July, 2011
SHAZAM!
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 22nd, 2011
Hereward The Wake - Last of the English!
The Lone Ranger gallops through the suburbs,
his sidekick on the smaller horse. Legends
gather, like tumbleweed – Beowulf, Robin Hood.
He’s making for the badlands of the best
hotel, where blue-chinned ones with foreign names,
amidst the liquor and the girls, conspire…
Elsewhere, no one is wholly innocent
but in rhetorical worlds – Question Time
in the House, the lounge of the Albion,
the Synod – there are only opposites.
‘Good’ and ‘evil’ have a human shape…
The gun smoke clears and everyone is dead.
“Long live Captain Marvel!â€
CARLTON CENTRE, JOHANNESBURG – APRIL 2009
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 22nd, 2011
As the city’s original centre is reclaimed
from anarchy by its citizens of colour,
this skyscraper – the tallest building in Africa -
built in the Apartheid era, in white Joburg,
begins to be used again: its shopping centre
and car parks thrive with consumerism,
and its fiftieth floor is a haven for lovers -
and a belvedere for occasional tourists.
We can see the township taxis jam the streets below,
washing lines on the roofs of re-occupied buildings,
the Mandela Bridge over the railway, the Market Theatre,
Hillbrow, the suburbs and, in the far distance,
the deserted ramparts of the gold reefs.
This place has survived. They have made it.
BOLOGNA LA GRASSA
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 22nd, 2011
A roma woman, cradling a child, sits
cross-legged in a tie-and-dye dress and begs
from fur-coated women strolling beneath
the portico of the Pavaglione.
Enamelled photos of resistance fighters
are displayed on the side of the Town Hall.
Where the bomb blasted the station wall,
the crack has been crystallised in plate glass.
Nicolò Dell’Arca’s terracotta
pietà , its smug patron as Joseph
of Aramathea, with a concerned
angel as onlooker, portrays four women,
mothers petrified in distress, in despair,
in that grief which threatens breath and heartbeat.
OF GOLDEN DAYS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 22nd, 2011
On this auspicious date in July:
Richard the Lionheart was crowned; Thomas Cook
ran his first railway excursion, Leicester
to Peterborough and back; Thomas More
was beheaded; Horlicks went on sale; Newton
published his ‘Principia’; John Lennon
met Paul McCartney; Pasteur cured rabies;
the first full length talkie was premiered…
From that date in ‘61 – a blind date
(you with the black spot to avenge a friend
and, after, changing your mind and your heart,
and me, innocently of course, longing
for sex and romance) – justice, being blind,
has sentenced us to our just deserts,
locked us up in half a century of love
with all its longing, its hurt, and its joy.
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