Posts Tagged Manhattan
THE WAR ON TERROR
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on October 27th, 2010
2001
Riding the F Train that August –
from Queens to Manhattan, Jamaica
Estates to Times Square – were all
of the hues and tongues and tribes and faiths.
Dead at our door, on our return,
wings stretched as if in flight,
lay a hen harrier, a female.
You chose to bury it gently
in the warm September earth.
Five thousand miles away, we watched
the towers fall. Later, building Babel
replaced the grace of humanity.
So many of the peoples of the earth
had gathered there. In the plaza’s fountain,
a bronze globe had turned perpetually. All
went to dust in a whirligig of fire.
2003
Atlantic waves broke on the empty sand.
Undeterred by us, a beetle crossed the dunes.
Almost due south was Casablanca.
…in all the towns in all the world…
We followed the war by satellite. Graven
effigies fell. Truths unfurled like smoke, like spume.
In the estuary – where ships from Tyre
and Ostia Antica had hoved to –
at low tide, small crabs emerged, waving.
…in all the gin joints in all the towns…
Wretches, saved, like you and me!
AFTER THE RIOTS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on April 18th, 2010
A skyline as idiosyncratic
as Manhattan’s, Chicago’s – its totems
of wealth, faith and dominion – belies
the city’s cruelty: fortunes from famine,
despotism, slavery; licensing
of squalor, bigotry and despair.
In the park where the Orange Lodge drummed out
The Twelfth, a rape was immediate headlines -
white girl, black youths. In Toxteth – its decayed
squares and terraces built on molasses
and cotton, some street signs repainted green,
gold, red, the colours of Rastafari -
was daubed, ‘Vote ANC’.
GEORGE GERSHWIN AT CHIRK CASTLE
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on January 31st, 2010
Chirk Castle from the North, Peter Tillemans, 1725
As we walk up the steep driveway, stopping
for breath at the curve where the castle
comes into sight – raised to block the routes
through the Dee Valley and Glyn Ceiriog
to starve the Welsh – a beribboned Rolls
descends, bride waving, followed, on foot,
by the wedding party in straggles -
black suits and brown shoes, wispy wedding hats -
treading the incline with tipsy effort.
‘The radio and the telephone
And the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies,
And in time may go!’
George Gershwin, born Jacob Gershovitz,
the second son of Russian immigrants,
ex song plugger in Tin Pan Alley
at Remick’s on West 28th Street,
in his thirtieth year visits Europe,
renews acquaintance with Alban Berg,
Ravel, Poulenc, Milhaud, Prokokiev
and William Walton, hears Rhapsody in Blue
and Concerto in F performed in Paris.
From the grassed walk above the Ha-ha,
we can see the main gates, unused now,
the lane to the station, the Cadbury
and MDF factories, the market town
of Chirk itself and, beyond, the panorama -
from Bickerton Hills to The Long Mynd -
as we follow the trail of illicit confetti
to the Doric Temple aka summerhouse.
‘But, oh my dear,
Our love is here to stay.
Together we’re
Going a long, long way.’
The 8th Lord Howard De Walden – Tommy
to friends and family, Eton and Sandhurst,
Boer War and Great War, race horse owner,
playwright, theatre impresario -
turned its 14th century chapel
into a concert hall and invited George.
The westering sun shines upon us, dreaming
in the Temple, your head upon my shoulder.
A flock of starlings swarms suddenly
above the town – waltzing, deceiving like
a net, substantial, delicate – and is gone.
‘In time the Rockies may crumble,
Gibraltar may tumble,
There’re only made of clay,
But our love is here to stay.’
There is no public record of what he played
or when or how he got here. I like to think
he chose the stopping train from Paddington,
to work on An American in Paris,
and that Tommy met him personally
at Chirk Station, drove him up the hill,
in his Hispano-Suiza, through the baroque
wrought iron gates replete with wolves’ and eagles’ heads -
and as they, genius and renaissance man,
chatted about the history of the place,
along the chestnut lined drive among
the grazing sheep, George thought of Brooklyn’s
geometric streets and of Manhattan’s roar.
Remick's Music Store, 1914
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