David Selzer

THE LION OF KNIDOS

By David Selzer June 28, 2019 In Poetry 3 British Museum Ancient Egypt, Buddhist

Near one corner of the British Museum’s

Great Court – the largest, roofed, public square

in Europe – the Lion reclines on a plinth.

It was stolen, a couple of years

after the Crimean War, from a ruined

tomb in Turkey. Its limestone body

had once been adorned with marble, its empty

eye sockets with glass to glint in sunlight

and glow in moonlight. Whether because

its pockmarked flanks seem sad or its eyeless face

appears benign visitors are keen to pose

for photos with the beast as backdrop.

CONVALESCENCE

By David Selzer June 28, 2019 In Poetry 0 Carpe Diem, Liverpool

We drove towards the River Dee – down walled lanes

with rhododendrons festooning the sandstone,

their attic blooms in imperial colours –

to visit a doughty friend convalescing,

from two knee replacements, in Seize The Day,

a recently opened upmarket care home.

As we turned into the drive, I realised

that this, long before rebuilding, was where

my mother had first trained to be a nurse –

sixteen, with her friend, Belle. They cared for children

with TB from the Liverpool slums.

ASYLUM SEEKER

By David Selzer June 28, 2019 In Poetry 2 greener, Hamburg

i.m. Samuel Selzer

He was never sure if it had been a joke

when the police arrested him for being,

he learned later, Jack the Ripper,

even though the last murder had been

a dozen years before, and he himself

had been eight and far away – or just

a lesson for yet another alien

wandering Whitechapel as if he had

a right to be lost in a pea souper.

Fresh from the Hamburg boat docked at Tilbury,

THE BRIDGE

By David Selzer June 28, 2019 In Poetry 1 'Colossus of Roads', A5

Where the Menai Straits are at their narrowest,

between two bluffs, Thomas Telford chose to build

his one span suspension bridge, high enough

for tall ships to pass. The two towers,

exposed to the tides, were built of limestone blocks

from the Penmon quarries on the coast

north of here. Caernavon Castle had been built

from Penmon stone – and blocks were shipped to Dublin

to line the Liffey with wharfs and quays.

Telford, the ‘Colossus of Roads’, was reared

in penury –

AN AFTERNOON IN MAY

By David Selzer May 28, 2019 In Poetry 4 Arctic Whale, Beluga

By our side gate the old laburnum – whose wood,

in time, may make a chanter or a flute –

is in bloom. I look up through its branches.

There is a little azure and smidgens

of green – and droplets, ringlets, links, chains

of cascading yellow, a torrent of gold.

***

Our Edwardian neighbourhood fills

with the machined roar of twin turbofans.

An Airbus Beluga – more Arctic whale

than Caspian sturgeon –

THE MUSEUMS

By David Selzer May 28, 2019 In Poetry 3 African Penguins, apartheid

For Sizwe Vilakazi

ROBBEN ISLAND, CAPE TOWN

Except when the Atlantic fog surprises,

from high ground in the city the island

is present like a leviathan,

its lights at night like white phosphorous,

a place of banishment since the first ships,

among seals and penguins.

DISTRICT SIX, CAPE TOWN

Razing its streets, clearing this cosmopolis

of Asians, atheists,

All Posts By David Selzer

David Selzer

THE LION OF KNIDOS

CONVALESCENCE

ASYLUM SEEKER

THE BRIDGE

AN AFTERNOON IN MAY

THE MUSEUMS

David Selzer

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