October Poem.

When did I meet you first?
Where did we first speak?
In Germany or on St. Stephen`s Green?
By the Liffey or by the Rhine?
I just can`t recall the day, the month, the year,
And I barely remember your voice,
Or the colours in your eyes.
Recollections distort the logic of all dates,
Disrupt all sense of order.

I peer back downwards through a hall of mirrors
Into the troubled epic of my life
And discern no clear trajectory,
No clarity of light dissecting time,
No perfect dawn, no corn flower moon,
No ordered flights of galaxies hoarding memory,
Just a fizz of shooting stars;
Inconsequential phenomena that I study
For no particular, no considered reason,
Through the wrong end of a telescope,
And a tiny cracked reflector.
Sadly I accept that all that lives must die;
But nothing cuts deeper than the loss of dreams.

What I cannot forget is the walk we took by the river
That crimson streaked, cold October evening,
When we first linked hands in secret, shaken by fear,
By timidity, by the elemental imperative of love.
The trees cascaded bright flames all around us;
Burnt paper stars descending, drifting, falling,
Like motes adrift in smoke;
Burnt stars crushed beneath our carefree feet
That quiet autumnal evening, a decade or more ago.
Today the woodland fires are burning, burning, burning.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
October 16th. - 30th. 2012. - October 18th. 2018.