Posts Tagged Europe
A PLACE AND A NAME
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on November 29th, 2011
Of the nine men in the photograph, eight
are soldiers, their boots as yet unblemished.
One of them cuts the ninth man’s hair and beard.
Though his prayer shawl is trailing on the ground,
his waistcoat is firmly fastened, watch chain
still in place. He is standing stolidly
as in a queue. His eyes only we see.
He looks through the lens with – not fear – contempt.
The burning of children, of millions deceives.
‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…’
ON FIRST READING ‘THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO’
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 24th, 2011
It was time to revise our atlases.
Europe was a river of broken ice,
Russia a mouth widening to a
frozen sea. GULAG was permanent winter.
Innocent, we had traced railways to
romantic ends. The atlas of knowledge showed
obscured crimes, its charts the colours and scale
of blizzards. A new world had been shaping.
Multitudes were shunted across nations.
A chronicle of whispers is the pure
saga, epic of the supreme fiction,
where history is lost, where ten million
lives are broken like glass.
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.
THE SAME SHARED GROUND
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 23rd, 2009
Dee Estuary from Gayton Sands. © SCES 2009.
Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground -
a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass
like early snow. A navigable channel
is impossibly distant, far-off as
childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.
Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low
as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this -
ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,
teasing out hills, a slow explosion
of seas. I imagine, back in Europe’s
reticular forests, a homely,
mackerel sky caught in another’s vision -
ancient weathers, sand settling in a pool,
pebbles jarred momentarily, the shape
and sense of time.
Towing the continent,
hulks sailed west. Only fulmars passed. The past
stretches like a landscape from this instant,
encompassing it. The oneness of things,
their disparateness I taste like blood:
the jest at the heart – being here and now
who could so easily have been elsewhere
or no one.
Oblivious of ironies,
soarers and coasters cohabit. The ice
was deep as mountains. I am shrouded in
imagining’s ponderous white oceans.
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