Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
In a compound some two miles square, surrounded
by razor wire and guard towers, on a hillside
three miles north east of the airport and six
from Kabul’s centre, are rows of burnt out cars
and pick-ups. Beneath the vehicles
are solidified pools of molten metal.
Elsewhere in the compound are the ruins
of a mock-up village used to train
operatives to carry out night terror raids.
The recreational block is intact.
Inside are unfinished meals and abandoned
games of chess.
‘Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room in the country for two peoples… the only solution [after World War II ends] is a Land of Israel…without Arabs…’ Yosef Weitz, 1940.
At first glance the photo only seems to show
three men standing side by side on a slope
somewhere in Palestine. They are dressed
like professional men, Americans
or Europeans. The one in the middle
holds a map of some sort in his left hand,
and points at something in the distance
with his right.
The war is two years over. The tide is out,
and the beach clear of detritus except
for part of an upended landing stage,
like a leviathan’s jaw, in a pool.
Beside it there are four small children,
who are playing the serious, absorbing games
the very young play with wet, fugitive sand.
The photographer, whose parents were murdered
by the Nazis, was killed by machine gun fire
near the Suez Canal. He photographed
Ingrid Bergman with a dove, and Picasso
with ‘Guernica’;
Before the six counties of Northern Island
had civil rights, when some subjects had two votes
and some had none, and our constitution
permitted such injustice, I was woken,
in my third floor student digs on Newsham Drive,
Liverpool, early one summer Saturday
by pipes and drums and accordions.
The city’s Orange Lodges were having
their family day out in Newsham Park –
more than ninety Lodges each with a band
of swagger and lilt: ‘The Sash My Father Wore’,
We are told by a Minister of the Crown
that the ‘death toll is mercifully low’,
that we must ‘learn to live’ with the pandemic.
We are a mature democracy but
allow ourselves to be treated like infants.
Though his writ runs only in the largest part
of these unequal, disunited kingdoms,
his pronouncements dominate the media.
He is the son of working class Pakistani
immigrants. A banker by trade, his vowels –
though not those of one who would have ordered
“Over the top!”,
I first met David and Sylvia Selzer – www.sylviaselzer.com – many years ago when, as a child, I would go to watch my parents rehearsing plays at Chester Little Theatre. At first I saw them as newcomers (if younger) joining a group of eccentric and opaque would-be-actors, producers, and set designers, who were also surrogate aunties and uncles to my sister and me. Gradually, as I grew up, I became more aware of their vitality, curiosity and creative urgency, and I no longer thought of them merely as two in a crowd, but as my own special friends.
OTHER PEOPLE'S FLOWERS Tricia Durdey: Writer
CIA HQ, AFGHANISTAN, 2021
CIA HQ, AFGHANISTAN, 2021
CIRCUSES WITHOUT THE BREAD
CIRCUSES WITHOUT THE BREAD