Posts Tagged love
WISHES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 29th, 2011
For Evelyn b. 13 1.10
Born to good music by strong women,
Ella’s ‘isle of joy’, Nina’s ’it’s a new dawn’ -
how you nestle in your parents’ untrammelled
love, how you suck with unrelenting hunger!
Born into a world of rubble, with children
buried alive, a world of chicanery
and hatreds – you have entered a difficult,
place, little Evie, somewhere remarkable,
full of tears and amazing kindnesses!
Born into a world of snow, a fox’s
nocturnal tracks in the white garden
of the tall, Victorian villa, a Blackcap
at the bird feeder, a Redwing sheltering
in the laurel and, away on the Downs,
boys and girls, freed from school, tobogganing
over the fossils and flints on the steep shore
of a palaeolithic sea – how you squirm
with hunger, how you bask in so much love!
Three wishes then for you, little bird:
may you be lucky, may you be gracious,
may you always have someone to love!
UNDER NOVEMBER SKIES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on November 28th, 2010
The rain has stopped. We can hear only the wind
and a swollen stream – hidden beneath
the high moor’s golden fern – rush through a culvert
under the road, which glistens, after the shower,
in an unexpected shaft of sunlight.
Rain clouds are blackening the mountains
to the west but northwards, beyond bracken
and gorse that stretches seemingly to land’s edge,
through a gap in the hills, we can see the sea,
a sunny blue, and a white ship sailing east –
too far away to recognise her flags.
Chance has brought us here as winter comes. Love
stays us against the dark.
FIDO
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on January 31st, 2010
Once, when she was very small, a dream woke me.
Dawn, iron cages, a tiger and the eager,
little zoo keeper reaching out to pat it…
She slept soundly, her menagerie too:
balding princess, purblind bear, Mummy -
though not Daddy now nor, in the garden, Fido.
Oozing kapok, hair eroded by
loving, his one eye tarnished but keen like
small expectations, he kept faith by the swing.
Love’s unreason maintained such shabbiness -
and left him out all night. Barefooted,
I fetched him in by the handle. How love’s
confusion aches the heart!
CHILDREN’S HOUR
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on June 22nd, 2009
About teatime, when the coals were glowing
liquid orange and cream, strands of soot
would catch on the fireback,
flickering like torches in a forest.
And behind the wireless’ fretwork facade
the valves were alight with Uncles and Aunties,
soothing, articulate, evocative and refined,
bringing us safely to the Weather and the News.
We listened to the same wonders, you and I,
tuned the static and the soot to pre-pubescent stories,
sensing there was something else
beyond the sideboard.
What if we could have been told -
by a clairvoyant Romany perhaps? -
that, out in the ether,
there was someone we would want to love forever.
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