Posts Tagged Victorian
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!
WHICH PASSETH UNDERSTANDING
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on May 25th, 2011
With wind soughing in the churchyard yews,
lichen marking the gravestones of labourer
and landowner, Saxon foundations,
mediaeval tower, sunlight fitful
through worthy Victorian stained glass,
a brass plaque for ‘those who gave their lives’,
the wheezy organ, the orotund Order
for the Burial of the Dead, ‘I am the
resurrection and the life…’ the vicar’s
gentle eulogy of the deceased,
one is almost tempted to wish God
were in his heaven where ‘we shall all
be changed…in the twinkling of an eye’
but common sense prevails.
PERSPECTIVES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 31st, 2010
From the long window on the half landing, I saw,
almost as soon as you had filled the small bird feeders
under the pine and come inside, the big beasts land
to eat the scattered seeds – three wood pigeons, two turtle doves
and a solitary magpie -Â then a cat appear, the birds scramble
and you again, shooing.
From where the hawk stoops, I heard the magpie’s
irrelevant chatterings, saw a tableau of live flesh;
saw our Victorian suburb from where the airplane flies -
heard nothing above the thrumming of the engines;
from beyond the stratosphere, saw somewhere
still not yet silenced by the enveloping yellow
of the Sahara or the Arctic’s melting blue.
From the long window, I heard the next track begin -
late Billie Holiday, ‘Dancing Cheek to Cheek’ -
heard her miss the key change yet again, promised myself
never to play it yet again.
Recent Comments