Posts Tagged ghosts
THE HEART’S TESTIMONY
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on April 29th, 2011
I am a gumshoe tailing mortality,
a shammus staking out history,
death’s sleuth. The past has bequeathed itself,
its deceiving legacy of meanings.
Here is the evidence, thronging the cramped,
provincial streets – the line of a wall,
family remembrance, an ancient name.
Before terraces and villas, before
canal and railway, under pavements
and metalled roads, beneath fields is lost heathland,
a forsaken brook. There are only stones
and ghosts and the heart’s testimony – childhood,
ambition, emptiness.
ambition, canal, childhood, death, emptiness, forsaken, ghosts, gumshoe, heart, heathland, history, legacy, lost, metalled, mortality, provincial, railway, remembrance, shamus, sleuth, stones, terraces, testimony, villas
VISITING MOTHER IN BEDLAM
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 30th, 2009
For all the pretty curtains and the tasteful prints
and the carers’ determined bonhomie,
this is the house of the mad and my mother
a permanent resident.
Â
Sane, she was aggressive. She is docile now.
She was unsociable, sane. Now she smarms -
at folk she’d once have considered common.
Â
She thinks I am dead or my long dead father.
You’re a nurse or her daughter. Alzheimer’s
is the ultimate in wish fulfilment.
Â
The deranged have no beauty or dignity, only
the trick of absolute exclusion. Yet you move
amongst these ghosts with such brave, loving
surefootedness. Je suis desolé!
Alzheimer’s, Bedlam, brave, deranged, fulfilment, ghosts, loving, mad, mother, sane, surefootedness, unsociable
THE HEART’S TESTIMONY
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on August 21st, 2009
I am a gumshoe tailing mortality,
a shammus staking out history,
death’s sleuth. The past has bequeathed itself,
its deceiving legacy of meanings.
Here is the evidence, thronging the cramped,
provincial streets – the line of a wall,
family remembrance, an ancient name.
Before terraces and villas, before
canal and railway, under pavements
and metalled roads, beneath fields is lost heathland,
a forsaken brook. There are only stones
and ghosts and the heart’s testimony – childhood,
ambition, emptiness.
amibition, canal, childhood, death, emptiness, forsaken, ghosts, gumshoe, heart, heathland, history, legacy, lost, metalled, mortality, provincial, railway, remembrance, shammus, sleuth, stones, terraces, testimony, villas
Recent Comments