Alma of Sarajevo. (Revised Version).

The most beautiful smile in the world -
The smile of a pregnant woman,
Shy, ecstatic, playful;
The roses pressed to her heart
Bereft of thorns.

She has almost forgiven the soldier who killed her brother,
Almost, but not entirely.
The ruins concealing the snipers are now just ruins;
Wild flowers have sprung up under the broken walls.
She stoops in silence, displaying a simple formality,
And lays the roses gently upon his grave.

Concealed in darkness
Her unborn infant
turns and kicks
with abrupt power.
The mother stares half blind at ice white grave stones
And grabs her stomach to kill the sudden pain.
Her cry makes desolate the quiet spaces.

Visceral terror swiftly subsides
But carves a wound that will for all time scar her
Deep, unyielding.
The memory of the day when she was shot
And clubbed with rifle butts by rebel soldiers
Is, strangely, somehow easier to live with
Than these ferocious seconds of foetal pain.

It is now ten years since the fighting ceased.-
Hugging her pregnant belly
She begins the long slow climb back to her home
High on the swart hill.
An irrational fear of losing her unborn baby
Numbs her fraught mind. She exists without true hope,
Nihilistic, empty.

Reminiscent of gunfire
The splintering of a hewn oak
Stings the air.

Instinctively she bows her head and runs,
Just as her brother ran the day he died
Caught in the mountains that circle Sarajevo.

It is hard to keep a footing on this path,
The surface falls away, disintegrates beneath her;
It is porous,  grey like ash.

Ancient pines conceal the path in shadow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
11th. - 12th. - 24th. January - 8th. March 2013.
Rewritten 28th. - 29th. - 30th. August  - 2nd. - 4th. - 13th. September 2014.  

For all brave women caught up in wars.

(1) Bleak Evening. (2) After the Run (New Version).

               
                  1.
         Bleak Evening.

The familiar is now strange and hostile.
I crouch down by the darkened window weeping,
Head pressed against the glass.

You walked out of my room when the clock struck seven,
Clunky sensible shoes scuffing the carpet
As though it were the enemy, an impediment to your departure.

Stunned by irrevocable loss
My mind grows blank with fear,
Equilibrium destroyed.

You had begged me not to watch you leave,
To turn my face to the wall and close my eyes,
But the imagined is always more cruel than the simple truth.

Outside the streets are empty, lashed by rain.
The violence of the night wind shakes the casement.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 14th. - 25th. 2014. 

-------------------------------------------
                  2

       After the Run.

The night the Play closed
The imagined characters vanished like dry ice
Blown on the wind.

The actors were left to fret and mourn
For a loss more poignant than the deaths of friends
Or the parting of coleagues revered and adored.

It was hard to relinquish the love that they felt
For personas created night after night
As they trod the unforgiving boards.

Even the cascades of excited applause
Could not fill a space now dark and empty;
Nothing, in fact, could assuage such sorrow.

The bunches of flowers thrown down on the stage
Tumbled like snow that would melt tomorrow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
August 25th. - 27th. 2014.

I would like to say thank you to everyone who reads my poems, especially to Malcolm Evison who has encouraged my writing and painting over many years.

Rose Alley.

I am a friend of the rose,
That is why my garden is full of blooms
Making a theatre of colour.

Shakespeare would have understood this surely
Speaking of the sweetness of a name
Tongue in cheek, Pen poised like a rapier.

He crammed the whole of life into his sonnets,
Speaking for Everyman in cryptic verse
That cut straight to the heart and stung the mind.

His London now lies deep beneath cold concrete,
And only the names of streets and ancient churches
Bear witness to the mayhem that he knew.

There is little room to draw breath in this city,
Let alone write a sonnet. For me, alas, this garden must suffice.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter
22nd. August 2014.

For Emily who taught me to love the sonnets. 

Falling Asleep by the Crystal Mirror. (Revised).

Winter nights offer no solace to the solitary.

I look deep into the mirror by my bedside
While trying hard to conjure something tangible
Out of the thickening dark,
The interwoven webs of threatening shadows
That hold clarity in pawn
And turn the crystal eye of memory purblind.

I imagine the materialization of my dreams,
A physical restoration of old hopes
Upon the murky surface of the mirror.
An ill defined image of my lover
Haunting the edge of consciousness
Where the sanctified and the sacrilegious meet.

I imagine a realization that I can almost touch,
Hold in the tenderness of my fingers
Like a cinematic image that seems so real
That it becomes real on the surface of the mirror;
A reflection clearer than a 3D picture
Projected down into the tangled dreamscape
Like a soft light filtered through a smoke filled theatre.

Stunned by your loss, the absence of your laughter,
It is your love that every night I search for
As I look deep, deep into the darkening glass.
I scan for your face behind my reflected face
In the sombre gloom, the veils of shadow,
The transposed inscape of the dusky mirror
That draws me deeper, and yet deeper, and deeper
Into the compromised sanctuary, the festering solitude

Of a savage hopelessness.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
20th. June - 4th. November 2003.
14th. - 18th. August 2014. 

Ladbroke Grove 1987.

I broke my promise.
I did not visit you.
I sat all alone in the pub
Nursing my self regard
Like a pampered pop star.
Disturbed by your candid awkwardness
I had become afraid of intimacy.

You waited all day in your room,
Staring out of the window at the passing crowd,
Hoping to spy the visitor who never came.
The day cooled and darkened,
A shower sluiced the streets; wild rivulets of mud
Gushing through the gutters,
Flooding pot holes and making the cross roads dangerous.
The weather mirrored your mood with uncanny precision.
You slammed the window tight against the driving rain.

Your friends told me that you cried then;
Turned your face to the wall, tore at the curtain,
Broke a glass.
You had never shown me your tears,
Nor your anger, nor your love,
But your silence was familiar to me.

The next day I arrived on the doorstep,
Dishevelled, unkempt, just like the weather.
You said nothing, your face was a stern mask,
A parchment scraped clean of writing.
My greeting was treated with a quiet contempt,
A deft glance at the door mat. - Frozen out
I snatched some chit-chat with your neighbour,
Snippets of news and some general tittle-tattle.
You were watchful, aloof; but hunched by the fire
took note of my every statement, thinking.

And then you stood up, head lowered, just like a nun,
Or maybe a Pre-Raphaelite priestess nursing a grief.
Gently you brushed my face with your index finger
As you passed by me, not speaking, to your room.
I stared at the lino, now noting how worn it was,
Spotted by cigarette burns; a decade of greasy staining:
One corner was scuffed up and broken.

Your father put down his newspaper
and brushed some crumbs off his sleave.

The door closed slowly behind you.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 16th. - 19th. 2008. - August 2nd. 2012.
Re-Written and re-titled August 8th. - 18th. 2014.

A version of this poem titled London 1966 was published on my Blog in 2012.
This new version more accurately represents the events, place and date. 
The poem is dedicated to a wonderful person.

(1) West Hendon Murder.. (2) Cut Out. (3) A Shared Nightmare. (Revised) (4) The Angry Voter.

                1.

  West Hendon Murder.


The War Memorial in York Park has been smashed down.

Soon the Park will be buried under apartment blocks.

Lip service is given to remembering the fallen
while the good life that they died for is squandered under concrete,
White slabs fit for graffiti.

The Poor Kids Playground, laid out where innocents died
By a Borough Council that cared for the plight of the lowly,
Makes way for penthouses built to appease the toffs.
An uneasy silence has supplanted the laughter of children.

The War Memorial in York Park has been smashed down.

The grandchildren of the fallen have lost their heritage.

They have been sold down the sewer by the Council
that should have worked Hard to protect them.

Farewell high ideals and sanity,
You are no longer required in a world grown rabid and  venal.
Welcome forgetfulness and anarchy.
Welcome the Paradise of the Fool.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 5th. - 6th. - 10th. 2014. 


-------------------------------------------------------------      

                2.

          Cut Out.


Matisse
The bee does not sting as fiercely as you,
Your Colours drive me wild.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 4th. 2014.

-----------------------------

                  3.

     A Shared Nightmare. (Revised)


Through a glass darkly I dream you
Dream hopes I must forsake

Flecked by sombre shadows
The mist dissolves the lake

I fear that we are drowning
and yet we dare not wake

Your voice cries out forlornly
Cries out across the lake

Our hands meet in the darkness
A cold dawn starts to break

Fingers melt like icicles
Melt back into the lake

Through a glass darkly I dream you


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 7th. 1980. _ March 14th. _ August 4th. 2014.
Revised December 18th. 2014.

------------------------------------------------

                    4

       The Angry Voter.


          
           X


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
1965.