Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on June 25th, 2011
When I drive over the moors
in the hugger-mugger traffic,
I think of the children
murdered, hidden.
When I see the southern sweep
of the Saddleworth Road
over the fern and the peat,
I think of them.
It is almost a prayer.
And I wonder if my chance,
fellow travellers think the same.
Remembrance is solitary, transitory.
children, fellow travellers, hugger-mugger, M6, remembrance, Saddleworth, The Moors Murders, The Pennines
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
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
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NOTICE - I, DAVID JOHN BERNARD SELZER, hereby assert and give notice of my right under section 77 of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patented Act 1988 to be identified as the author of all works presented within this website, http://www.davidselzer.com/
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS - Some of the poems on the website have appeared, in one form or another, in the following: A Jar Of Sticklebacks, Anglo-Welsh Review, Jabberwocky, Life Lines, Peterloo Anthology, Poetry in the Seventies, Poetry Matters. Poetry Merseyside, Meridian, Still Life, The Honest Ulsterman and the Times Literary Supplement. Some have been broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside. HERRINGS was performed at Action Transport Theatre in 2005.
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