1.
The Streams of Lough Melvin.
The river contorts over stones
Reminding me, for no clear reason, of a knuckle thrust into my face
By a fretful infant
Urgently demanding my time, my total attention.
Being no geologist, here, at the rapids brink, this fraught re-enactment of Dis,
I stare, with an untutored interest,
Down into translucent layers of ancient time
To explore a ferocity of movement, a convulsion of currents, side swiped deflections
reflecting my fears, my suicidal deletes.
I stare, like a wild man, deep into the troubled waters,
The voice of some river god permeating my addled brain
With unclear warnings, garbled chants, an oblique reference to Charon.
The god of this untamed river let loose by the rain? Perhaps?
More likely a substrata reminder of my fragile mortality.
Thrashing flash floods envelope flat granite blocks
That, long before Noah took ship, were sheaved in thick skins of old limestone
That then seemed forever
But have long since been pounded to sludge.
My Grandchildren laugh at my stillness,
Contemplation is not to their liking,
It is monkish, old fashioned, outmoded,
It is not on their template of skills.
They pummel me out of the way of the restless water
Onto the new gravel causeway
That climbs to the town on the hill.
But the rapids still roaring behind me are pulling me back and back and back
To plummet an implacable darkness.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter
29th. - 30th. April. May 1st. 2nd. 2013.
Dedicated to the Late Peter Odell, died 27/04/2013 aged 56 years.
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2.
Bad Weather Friends.
I am your threadbare overcoat
That you throw on over your shoulders
To keep yourself warm
On chilled out winter nights.
But I also feel the cold
When you hang me up in the wardrobe
And leave me there in the dark,
For week after unlived week,
Absorbing the odour of moth balls.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 4th. 2013.
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