1.
That was the year we walked on the Serpentine,
A thousand bells ringing under our feet
In the secretive kingdom of ice.
That was the winter when everything changed
Into something strange, beyond myth and folklore,
Not catalogued in forensic Libraries.
Prized volumes turned brittle in frozen fingers
Like slivers of glass crazed by the cold;
Sharp voiced poems, compelling as icicles,
Melted in pockets;
Novels, transfigured upon the wind
Into luminous flakes of fragile snow,
Dissolved without trace.
And wherever we walked, invisible bells
Delicately, icily ringing.
2 .
Alone, panicked, afraid in this northerly wilderness
Of bitter promises and upturned dreams,
Unaware that her poems would soon become famous,
A lost girl dying, unobserved in her kitchen,
Her babies asleep next door.
3.
A stubborn wind cutting out of the north lands,
Grey sleet swirling,
Riccocheting into the desiccated foliage
Of cauterized trees.
London, city of chaos and smokestacks,
Retreating behind a wintry curtain
Of secrecy and tears.
Urban foxes, crying out in the white streets
Like Silesian Werewolves,
Prising open our most sinister fears.
4.
At dawn I imagined the reappearance of Spring,
A sudden cloudburst of fraudulent snowdrops
Spilling fragrance over these desolate spaces;
The wind shut down to an impotent whisper,
The foxes at ease in their dens.
5.
But tonight, alone in her cold, rented kitchen,
The panicked young woman can no longer retrieve
Recollections of sunlight glistening on daffodils,
The wild, mindless swarming of new hatched bees,
But stares far into a cocoon of darkness
That she dreams as safe as a perfect childhood,
The consolation of home. A kiss from her mother
At the edge of the night.
Outside, voiced under the thrall of a lost world,
Ice bells delicately, eerily ringing.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 9th. - 14th. - 17th. March 16th. 2013.
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