A TERRIBLE PLACE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 21st, 2012
Posing for the camera’s long exposure,
his right foot firmly on the sledge, in bone
numbing, heart contracting temperatures,
was perhaps what brought that look into Scott’s eyes.
And the eyes always have it: his say,
I do not want to be here. Maybe that’s
twenty-twenty hindsight since we know
how it ends, with all the heroes dead.
Once this seemed to me a simple tale
of jingoism, derring do, class and
sacrifice, a prequel to The Somme.
Now, it’s all about him. That look speaks
of the loneliness of leadership,
the courage of enduring duty.
He was the last to die; his log’s last entry,
‘For God’s sake look after our people!’;
the last he saw of the world the tent’s
beating canvas lashed by the howling wind.
Note: The poem was first published in A JAR OF STICKLEBACKS – http://www.armadillocentral.com/authors/david-selzer.
LLECHWED SLATE CAVERNS, GWYNEDD
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 21st, 2012
The quarried cavern is vast as the
proverbial cathedral or, perhaps more
properly, higher than a chapel ceiling.
Amidst the rubble on the floor is a caban,
a small, slate lean-to. Though on piecework,
the quarrymen, erstwhile farmers and shepherds
driven here by poverty, stopped, at noon,
to sing, recite, debate for an hour -
their knowledge the power to sustain them.
RITES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 21st, 2012
That rite of passage of the middle class -
chauffeuring offspring to the varsity -
took us the breadth of England, from Hoole to Hull.
Extending her childhood, our parenthood
or both, we travelled the edge of hope
and longing, by acres of burning stubble
and slagheaps greening. In the rearview mirror,
she leant forward to gossip about
the future…When she was eight, we’d planted
her cherry tree, knowing she would one day
climb up it and out of sight. We watched it
blossom in her absence.
HERE ENDETH
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 21st, 2012
On Palm Sunday, a Scout Troop prepares
to enter the Parish Church – Victorian,
sandstone, its ‘dull interior’ mentioned
in Pevsner. Boys with badges for everything
celebrate the man of nothings. Flags
and cornets are favourable exchange
for fronds and donkey. Who would not believe
or ensure that suffering had purpose,
that someone should do our dying for us?
But who needs Jesus, with napalm and drought?
So let us now mock famous gods or lose
ourselves. The Reformation closes with
everyone Messiah.
A VIRTUOUS CIRCLE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on March 21st, 2012
In an ex-pat’s yard – Flemish or Dutch
the name on the gate suggests – the guinea fowl
panic. Two Booted Eagles are circling
down the valley from the ancient forest
of verdant oaks and chestnuts, sectoring
the yellow fields of maize and sunflowers
toward Monléon Magnoac, a village
now but once, before the Black Death, a new town
on a fortified hill top, one of more
than a thousand to soothe the wilderness
of Aquitaine, Languedoc and, here, Gascony
then English aka Norman crown estate.
Yet this was Basque country long before Norsemen
sailed through the Bosporus or up the Volga.
Northern Europeans have returned
as tax paying owner occupiers
rather than liege lords – an irony
which nobody appears to acknowledge.
After a night of rain, the river Gers,
rising in the Pyrenean foothills,
chases through the valley bottom.
It will broaden across the Magnoac
Plateau and flow into the Garronne,
and so into the Bay of Biscay,
Bizkaiko Golkoa in Basque – a gulf
of legendary storms and shipwrecks.
Impervious, as yet, to the almost
all determining past, she has found
a clayey puddle. She stamps and jumps.
The rich, pearly water rejoices.
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