The Limner`s Fairy Tale.

Today I ruined your portrait
Re vamped that slab of old pine
With swift fierce brush strokes,
Blotting out the mask of vanity
That so haunted my day lit dreams
Like the shadow of a scream.
I repainted each crack and crevice
That had scored the surface of the slab,
Smearing out each little memory
With brush and palette knife
Until the offences were removed.
But I retained one telling image,
One link with the broken past,
The scar of your snow white face
Scratched deeply into the wood.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.  July 31st. 2012.

Midday in December, Lovers Strolling.

Sunshine in December, ultra bright, ice bright,
A shimmering, an arctic light, searing through the
                     frosty air
Incandescent, scarring the naked eye, scorching
With a cold flame, a direct flame honed to cut
Fiercely through the heart of the day, this drear
                     December noon day
With imagined heat; a burnished glimmer,
                      a false beauty,
A sharp, iridescent strangeness forged to inscribe
A fantasy of summer, a fallacy of hope, deep
Deep into that frozen heart, the core of this day
Like a picture scored into ice, or graffiti scratched,
Etched by a diamond, deep, deep into a polished mirror.

Sunshine in December, incandescent, ice bright;
And we two walking, arm clasped in arm, close
Knit like frightened children, eyes smarting; heads,
Shoulders, pressed together, hunched tight against
The sear wind, the fierce light, the raw edge of winter;
Hunched tight, heads close, arm clasped in arm, we talk,
Talk of our unborn child, our proudest hope, our terror,
                       our future curled
Deep, deep inside the snug, the warm soft home
                       of your body;
Trusting, waiting, curled safe and sound, a true beauty.
Untroubled innocence,               a harbinger of Spring.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
18th. December 2003 - 22nd. July 2012.

Solstice.

               1

Beauty stuns my eyes,
I stare at the scorched horizon.

                2

Retreating out of the dawn world
The old Owl soars
Rising like the Phoenix
Ascending swiftly towards her pyre.

Feathers the colour of embers
Blackened by desolate rain;
His eyes, earth swallowed fires,
Scorn the light of redemption.

In the anguish of a resurrection,
Sought but barely conceived,
He darts deeply into the sunlight
That dazzles, torments, then stuns him.

Retreating into the dark cave
He embraces the ashes of sleep.

                 3

The morning light enthralls me.
Midsummer fires challenge the stars.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
9th April 1974. - 25th. June 2012.

BBC 2 Henry Vth.

I was extremely disappointed with the new (July 2012) television adaptation of Shakespeare`s play King Henry Vth. The actors were all brilliant, but the major speeches, for which the play is justly famous,  were mutilated, and whole scenes and characters went missing. The night before Agincourt in the French camp was reduced to a few short and barely intelligible tableaux, whereas the night scene in the English camp was played almost complete. Pistol did not get an opportunity to see a Leek let alone eat one, and the Boy apparently survived the battle despite the fact that Shakespeare informs his public that all the boys have been killed. I have never heard Shakespeare`s verse spoken so slowly and so portentously. If the lines had been spoken at the quick fire rate that Shakespeare`s art requires then fewer cuts would have been needed to squeeze the play into the time slot that the BBC had allocated. This was the fault of the direction, not of the actors. I was made so angry by this production that I threw my hat at the television. - Trevor Potter.22/07/12.    

In The Hospital.

Those caustic tears
Cut deep into your features
Like liquid barbed wire.

Sweet aspiration had faltered within you,
Changed by some fierce agency
into a stone.

For a moment the silence contained you.

Then your body cracked open
On an anvil of pain.

You screamed defiance,
Screaming, screaming, screaming,
Nailed to the cross of your solitude.

The ward echoed to your screams.

No one seemed to hear your anguish.
The peremptory remarks of the nurses
Were as bayonets in the hands of soldiers.

Blood dripped into the plastic container
Held between your knees.

Somehow you survived,
A little less innocent,
A little less hopeful,
Seeking a blank consolation
In the stasis of empty spaces.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

December 14th. - 15th. 2010.

Dante and Beatrice in Florence. Poem No.1

       
      Distilled fear terrorises this vision of perfection,
A tumult of lonely confusion snagged on the townscape
Like a fraught dream that is yet to materialise, erupt, overwhelm,
      Dissolve the quiet hinterland of Dante`s imagination
      With an abrupt squall of chaotic emotion
As he leans upon the narrow parapet, a courtly, half bidden admirer
Unconscious of danger, the caricaturist of Hell confirmed as a poet
       Entranced by her smile illuminating her beauty
As she steps, momentarily, across the half hidden courtyard
       Of the orderly house that he dare not enter.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter

August 7th. 2009  -  March 23rd. 2010.

An Introduction to this blog...

I was educated by artists and actors, trained in ballet and music. I have written poetry since age 13, but have rarely published. it can take a lifetime for a poem to evolve into something near a fully developed work of art. A painting can take five years to complete. Ideas evolve out of ideas, questions out of questions, until some sort of equilibrium, precarious balance is achieved, and there we have the finished work of art, which often provokes further questions. I have no sense of stability, of permanence, probably because i was born in London during the 2nd. World War. Destroyed buildings, sooty and weed covered, marked the city-scape that I grew up with, and the memory of the stark and ruined streets remains like scar tissue distorting my intellectual horizons.

Matisse

In my opinion, the works of Matisse and Picasso are still the back-bone of modern art.