Posts Tagged grief

Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on November 29th, 2011

Newly returned from Helmand, almost intact,

the Regiment stands to in scattered rain.

City dignatories and citizen privates

remember. They sing: ‘Where, Grave, thy victory?’

The Bishop blesses them all. A boy whimpers.

Old men, straight-backed, march singly into town,

medals jingling like choices. November wind

troubles the eye: remembering mates,

remembering merely being young, not dead

merely. This is a willing grief: forgetting

means that, for principle or custom,

death is merely dying, and the so-called

blood and treasure contract merely words.

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.

David Selzer