David Selzer

HARRY POTTER AND THE NORTHERN LINE

By David Selzer May 25, 2018 In Poetry 3 'A Jar of Sticklebacks', 'Elsewhere'

The timetabled rumble of the Northern Line

between King’s Cross and Euston stations

moves beneath the British Library’s

‘Harry Potter: A History of Magic’.

Aficionados like my granddaughter

are oblivious, focused on the wonder

of ancient texts and modern images,

the alchemy of ink, pigments, alphabets

transformed into art. Between trains there is

the clip-clopping of Centaur’s hooves.

We walk to King’s Cross to see Platform

9¾. People are queuing

to take selfies beneath the sign attached

to the wall next to The Harry Potter shop.

WILLIE AND THE HARE

By David Selzer May 25, 2018 In Poetry 0 Bushmills, caryatids

One had a lovely face,

And two or three had charm,

But charm and face were in vain

Because the mountain grass

Cannot but keep the form

Where the mountain hare has lain.

‘Memory,’ W.B. Yeats

Thomas Cubitt, London’s master builder, built

Woburn Buildings (on the Duke of Bedford’s land);

a pedestrianised street from Woburn Place

to what is now Euston Road, and abutting

St Pancras New Church with its caryatids

and ionic columns.

TAVISTOCK SQUARE

By David Selzer May 25, 2018 In Poetry 1 BMA, egotism

“Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn
filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim,
‘Good God! Here I am again!’…?” Virginia Woolf

The Woolfs’ house was on the south side of the Square.

From there the couple ran the Hogarth Press.

The place was razed by a stray bomb in the Blitz –

but they had moved, the year the war started,

to their house in Sussex near the river Ouse.

THE AMBIGUITY OF THEFT

By David Selzer May 25, 2018 In Poetry 0 'Assyria: Nimrud', Ashurnasirpal

Two of the rooms in the British Museum

I always visit are numbers 7

and 8, ‘Assyria: Nimrud’. Named,

in modern times, for the Biblical Nimrod

the three thousand year old city of Kalhu

is twenty miles south of Mosul. On display

from the palace of Ashurnasirpal

are gypsum panels, carved reliefs, products –

faultlessly sculpted – from a master’s workshop.

They are, for the most part, pristine, and portray

absolute kingship, its circumstance, pomp,

and prisoners’ heads severed after battle.

ENGLISH JOURNEY

By David Selzer May 25, 2018 In Poetry 0 Alstom, Canada Geese

I have made my English journey – by rail,

Chester to Euston return – maybe,

on average, three times a year since I was four.

It is like revisiting a ragged

museum of serendipitous

keepsakes: Canada Geese on Cheshire ponds;

GEC become Alstom in Stafford:

wind turbines and mobile phone towers

jostling radio masts near Rugby;

concrete cows in Milton Keynes; Ovaltine

in Kings Langley; Watford’s mosques;

and, anywhere, marshalling yards of

derelict rolling stock,

FLYING SOUTH

By David Selzer April 27, 2018 In Poetry 2 Alps, Aphrodite

Ascending south east from Manchester, over

Eyam, the ‘plague village’, towards the Wash;

cruising over the Channel, observing

the shipping below me with wonder like some

latter day Bleriot; then Rotterdam’s docks

and the Rhine; sun glinting momentarily

like fireflies, and I am nonchalant

as Icarus, mindful as Daedalus,

noting place names freighted with histories;

past Munich, and the bared Austrian Alps,

then due south along the Balkan Mountains,

smoke drifting north from polluting fires,

roads following the contours,

HARRY POTTER AND THE NORTHERN LINE

WILLIE AND THE HARE

TAVISTOCK SQUARE

THE AMBIGUITY OF THEFT

ENGLISH JOURNEY

FLYING SOUTH

David Selzer

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