Autumnal Mood Poem, Bankside London; Lovers Strolling. (A Poem in Three Sections).

                       1.

November sun
A marigold shrouded in white mist
Trying desperately to bloom.

We walk hand in hand
By the black waters of the sluggish river,
The cold wind cutting through our coats.

Summer has packed her bags and flown due south,
Hitching a lift on the spread wings
Of migrant birds.

We are forced to remain here by the chilly Thames
Safeguarding mementoes of warmer days
Deposited in flimsy boxes.

Faded memorandums scrawled on old note pads
More delicate than sheets of ancient newspaper,
Or dead leaves scattered by the wind.

We walk hand in hand,
A couple in thrall to the internet jungle
But more in love with the raw edged past
Than to the pseudo amnesiac twenty first century.

We walk hand in hand
Our lives reflected in the words of the poets
Who long ago burnished the mirror of language.

                        2.

Deep in the mud beneath these pavements
The ghost prints of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Fletcher
Have marked our environment forever.

We who keep Theatre alive on Bankside
Are not just the keepers of personal histories
But the full time guardians of civilisation.

We work for the world, not just for ourselves,
Nor the petulant flocks of summertime tourists
Who land in plane loads, take pics, then are gone.

We must toil all winter to keep the light burning
In the dark corners where memory shelters,
Locked in documents unread for centuries.

Memory stored in a fossilised shoe,
Or the scored bones of a baited bear
Dug out of the foreshore.

We walk hand in hand,
Our pockets bulging with renaissance play texts,
The newsroom spreadsheets of their era
Cobbled together on the banks of this river.

To safeguard this heritage we toil night and day,
In fear of the vandals who would desecrate history
If it blocked their access to easy money.

                         3.

A fragile mist rising over the water
Blurs the facade of a bling mad city,
Office blocks flashing a fluorescent cheapness
Rapier slashing the skin of the darkness.

We watch the twilight redden the dull waves
And talk of Leander alone by the sea
Dreaming of Hero, his priestess lover;
And for a time we forget this iron cold day.

For a time we forget the twenty first century
As we walk hand in hand, lost in each other.
We talk of the poets who fashioned our language
And dream of their past locked in London clay.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 21st. - 27th. - 28th. 2013.
December 4th. - 11th. 2013.
For all my friends at the Rose Theatre, Bankside.