Posts Tagged love

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!

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.

DavidSelzer.com