Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
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 –
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,
The incoming tide brings shoals of mackerel fry.
Herring gulls, perhaps a hundred, more,
young among them in their mottled plumage,
are yelling at the water’s edge, feeding
in frenzy as the small waves scatter.
Far out on the low, narrow, wooden jetty
my small family leans over to marvel
at the fishes before landfall. At my back
is the white crescent of hotels, the town,
the estuary, the mountains, sun setting.
They cross the beach, granddaughter running ahead,
After the shoot on Long Island’s Cedar Beach
they drove next to a local playground.
While Eve loaded her camera, Marilyn sat
on some play equipment and read a book –
her worn copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,
which she kept in her car, and had been reading
for some time, often aloud to get it’s sense.
(She looks to be about nine tenths through
so into Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated
soliloquy of love and longing).
This photograph of a pretty woman
in her late twenties,
For Mike Rogerson
The layout of our local park was finished
the year my mother was born, the year
before the Great War was started, and named
for Alexandra Saxe-coburg and Gotha
née Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg,
widow of the late King. An avenue
of lime trees – and a single row along
another path – was planted. My mother,
the Spring of the year she was war-widowed,
pushed me in my pram beneath them.
The site was launched in April 2009. A regular reader, Kira Somach, gave the site the following endorsement (in an email to me a couple of years ago), ‘Most people enjoy shopping delivered to their doorstep. I enjoy Selzer
Poetry delivered to mine’. A pithy, witty rationale!
The idea for the site came out of discussions with a friend and ex-colleague, John Plummer. He shared the development of his book, LIFELINES, with me and we talked about self-publishing. I raised the notion of his doing so via the web, but he opted quite understandably for the conventional route.
For a generation, like weather cocks,
their skeletons swung near the highway.
James Price and Thomas Brown had robbed the Mail.
Years turned. The Gowy flooded and the heath
flowered. Travellers noted the bones
hanging in chains by the Warrington road.
Justices ordered the gibbet removed,
the remains disposed of. In Price’s skull,
while Napoleon was crossing the Alps
or Telford building bridges or Hegel
defining Historical Necessity
or Goya painting Wellington’s portrait,
a robin made its nest.
‘But the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.’ Ezra Pound
Sitting in a traghetto, Olga Rudge
from Ohio and Ezra Pound from
Idaho – together fifty years,
from concert violinist to poet’s helpmate,
poet maker to fascist propagandist,
he, typically, with stick, wide brimmed hat,
floppy collar, she, wearing woollen gloves,
left hand clutching a large, canvas bag, right hand
a carefully folded scarf, dressed, like any
elderly woman, for a chilly day –
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,
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,
PAINTING PARADISE
ORGANISED CRIMES
PAINTING PARADISE
WHAT IS IT THAT STARTS A POEM?
ARS POETICA