Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
The silence woke her. Beyond the locked door
by now her maids should be chattering
in that harsh tongue. She went to the window.
Even the gulls on the battlements were mute.
And no guards on the ramparts, nobody
in the bailey. The straits were the colour
of the emerald at her neck – her father’s
wedding gift. A barque moved edgily
through the sands. Its pennants spoke of home.
The island’s coast was clear in the sun.
She imagined the light summer wind
stirring its fecund,
Dee Estuary from Gayton Sands. © Sylvia Selzer 2009.
Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground –
a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass
like early snow. A navigable channel
is impossibly distant, far-off as
childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.
Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low
as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this –
ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,
teasing out hills, a slow explosion
of seas. I imagine,
All of the names of the dead are Celtic
or English. Most of them died – in the prison
near the river – from typhoid rather than wounds.
Nobody set out to be cruel – farmers’
sons killing farmers’ sons. Their graveyard
above the bluffs was grassed, an obelisk built,
their names cast in bronze, bolted to limestone.
From the highway, there is no signage.
Eagles winter on the bluffs. America’s heart
is green and fecund: a confluence –
Illinois,
The Dodo, Ustad Mansur, Agra, 1610
For Sarah: always a conservationist, latterly a twitcher.
i
In Umbria – the cuore verde of pristine, wooded hills,
Orvieto’s honey-pale wines,
the paintings of Perugino and Pisano,
the Tiber’s milky jade,
tartufo nero –
they stew thrush.
ii
At least once in our suburban garden,
Blondin carrying his manager, Harry Colcord, on a tightrope.
Witness The Great Wallenda, an aging
high wire artiste, who, for his final act,
required technology’s summation –
tv, automobiles, bottles of plasma;
crossed a canyon on cable thin as a wrist;
walked on wire a quarter of a mile
above the earth. He stood, twice, on his head
and the crowds of thousands gasped, then cheered,
the noise muffled in that oh! profound gorge.
Hear them, silent on the leads,
watching their comrades,
the ensign, the corporal and the private
shot by firing squad
amongst the elms in the graveyard below.
Under the leaves in the summer,
Cromwell’s New Model Army
was practising democracy,
selecting all ranks for exemplary death –
the only leveller.
HINDSIGHT
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
ON FIRST READING ‘THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO’
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
BIRTHDAY GIRL UNDER HOUSE ARREST