The One Tun Part Five. / Threnody./ Legend.

         Threnody.

Girls who stooped to prayer
On the ice flecked sand
Wept.

High above their heads
The sea gull crowded sky
Danced

Light upon their faces
Upturned to seek the sun. -
Gulls

Shrieked cascades of echo
Against the holy words
Rising

Up to meet their fierceness
From the ice flecked ocean shore
Quietly

Sung by the stooping girls at prayer
Trapped against the wave wall
Waiting

For the tide to brake and turn
Back towards the Arctic wastes
And silence.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
1965. -  May 6th. - 8th. 2014. 

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The One Tun Part Five.

We mourned for the London that we were too young to have known.We felt that our parents were lucky to have witnessed the pre - blitz city. My mother had often spoken of the old streets of Paternoster where she once purchased a delicate little wrist watch. Hitler had transformed the area into a warren of skeletal ruins, gaunt reminders of tragedy standing deep in the shadow of St. Pauls. In those days the Cathedral was streaked by the filth emitted by coal fires, the exhaust pipes of motor vehicles, the flaming of incendiary bombs. War and pollution had changed this formerly elegant area into a requiem for itself. Soon great blocks of concrete and glass would expunge even these stark reminders of more graceful times.

Until the Cathedral was cleaned I had believed that the columns in the porticoes had been carved from black stone. Now they glow pristine white in the smog free air. But diesel and petrol fumes continue to damage buildings and the lungs of residents and daily commuters. People do not seem to want to understand that the chemicals that visibly erode brick and stone also cut into their own fragile bodies. How children grow up healthy in London remains a mystery to me. In the nineteen sixties we thoughtfully added cigarette smoke to the concoction of pollutants. The interiors of public houses, restaurants and cinemas, were usually viewed through a stench of tobacco fumes. There were times when some people stuck in a crowded room would retch because the air had been churned into a thick grey fug.

The ceiling of The One Tun was nicotine yellow. When the pub was crowded I often found that my eyes stung and my nose felt bunged up. A pint of the black stuff could never clear these symptoms. A walk in the park was the only reliable remedy. Regents Park was not too far distant, and sometimes I would stroll by myself to Camden town across the manicured lawns. But if I wanted to meet up with my friends on a summer afternoon I would wander down Charing Cross Road to St. James`s Park, via the Beatnik stronghold of Trafalgar Square. I was never a Beatnik myself, I was half a decade too young and also somewhat sceptical of their inchoate world view. My mind had been fashioned by the works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, and a little smattering of Eleanor Marx. I was also getting interested in St. Francis of Assisi, Omar Khayyam, and the Buddha. I did not discover Rumi until 1987, but the Communist Manifesto has lived on my bookshelf since my mid teens. Social change needed to be a structured revolutionary movement to succeed. It could not be brought about by hitch hiking around England and sleeping rough, or so I thought at the time. Nowadays I know that a component of improvisation informs every revolutionary movement. And the nineteen sixties were vibrant with an assorted plethora of social experiments. This was the decade in which life style choices became both possible and relevant. Social awareness in all it`s various forms, good and bad, went hand in hand with intense personal self development."Know yourself, but also know and (sometimes) love your neighbour". The Christian ideal of loving "thy neighbour as thyself" was not so popular, We were far too selfish and self indulgent for that. But somewhere deep within myself I knew this selfishness to be wrong, and tried, somewhat feebly, to resist it. My social conscience was already well developed, although I did not always act on it`s promptings. I would not then have described myself as a democratic communard, but that is what I was. I believed in equal rights and pay for everyone regardless of profession, race, age, culture or gender. An anti capitalist to the core, I refused to join any political party because I wished to retain the freedom to make up my own mind.

London in 1964 seemed like a backwater. A year later we thought we were the very centre of the world. By the time the Summer of Love came along, the impetus for change had become a powerful global force; almost as powerful as the pollution driven shrinking of the polar ice, a phenomenon as yet barely remarked upon ,except by one or two scientists. In 1967 it was a common belief that Gaia could be put in her place and bullied for the benefit of the human species. Capitalists and communists were intoxicated by this idea. Some of the Beatniks, and many more of the Hippies, were beginning to adopt a very different opinion.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 8th. 2014.

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        Legend.

Son of two fathers
I sit by the raging sea
Waiting for a single shout
To hale me home.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 6th. 2014.