1.
Easter 1966.
Girl
I remember the warmth of your love in a cold house;
The April wind rattling the sash windows;
The street dogs yelping.
We seldom linked our fingers, cuddled or kissed;
For hours we lay side by side co-writing ballads,
Their words long since forgotten.
One night we wove two wedding rings from strands of cotton;
But the plaintive wail of the passing trains
Told of unplanned journeys.
Twice we consulted the cards, measured our lifelines,
Your fate seemed tied to the north,
Mine to the south, in Southwark, by the somnambulant flow of the river.
Girl
This poem is an intimate letter
Encrypted into the night
On the keyboard of my computer.
The clock that you bought me is ticking
Like the fault in the groove of a record
Played hour after hour without stopping.
I have not, for one moment, ceased pining,
And time does not value compassion.
Please send a few words tomorrow.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 11th. 12th. - October 7th. - 8th. 2014.
April 6th. - 7th. - July 22nd.- 24th. - August 10th. - December 20th. 2015.
April 2nd. 2016.
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2.
The Biography of a Real Love.
We needed help that night,
The two old ladies taught you not to be afraid,
Not to turn tail and run;
Guiding you gently from the edge of panic
Into a quiet acceptance,
A peacefulness no child could ever know.
And eventually you proved to be the brave one,
Taking charge of the awkward situation,
In fact, being quite bossy as you held me to account,
Forcing me to accept the validity of our love.
Of course you were the more vulnerable of us two,
The more likely to suffer hurt, to be left holding the baby.
It is always hard to be a forthright girl
In love with a guy who is rarely in town when wanted.
You have been remarkably loyal over the decades,
Although we have never lived under the same roof
For more than a day or two;
You working all hours at the theatre, me simply filling in time.
Perhaps, now that we are much older
We should stop being quite so foolish;
We could stack all our goods in one pile
And settle back down together.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 11th. - July 15th. 2015.
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3.
Sunflowers.
After we had made love for the first time
The old gypsy women wrapped you in a thick blanquet
To keep you warm, there being no fire in the room
And heat thought of as necessary
To guarantee conception.
I was barred from hugging you close until the morning
And lay quite still at the edge of the bed sobbing
While you slept soundly, snug in your nest of wool,
A safe calm world
Sacred to you alone.
For the rest of that year we scarcely saw each other,
And then one morning came a call from the hospital
That sent me dashing out into the rain.
Your smile was radiant as a garden packed with sunflowers
When you spied me nervously enter the ward.
Holding our new born child while a nurse taught you to breast feed,
Arms made strong by love, eyes half blind with tears,
Helped me to blank from my mind those long cold weeks
When I wandered, always alone, through late night streets,
Calling out your name.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 29th. - 30th. - 31st. 2014.
Revised, July 20th. December 20th. 2015.
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4.
A Love Remembered, Forty Years On.
Girl
Slim as a Weeping Willow;
Hair unkempt, an ebony river
Flowing over frost white shoulders;
Eyes intense with sorrow.
The years stacked up, one on another,
Collated memoirs neatly catalogued
But rarely read, their contents censored,
The illustrations half rubbed out.
Shortly after our child was born
You shipped back home to misty Ulster,
Retreating from your life in London.
You mentioned only a short vacation,
But the evening that you boarded ship
A door slammed shut against the future
That we had quietly planned together,
Slammed shut with cruel finality.
I now know that our parents thought us
Too young to wed, to raise a family;
Too young to cut loose from the high life:
And so they packed you back home quickly,
A convict strictly monitored.
One weekday, while your parents were out working.
You stayed at home and tried to cut your wrists,
The baby fast asleep inside the cot.
With luck,your mother came home one hour early,
And she somehow found a way to save you
With cubes of ice and a tourniquet.
All this I learned some forty years too late,
A cryptic message from a perfect stranger.
Girl
These days I often visit Belfast City,
A restless town packed with fears and dreams;
The ghost filled shipyards; crudely stencilled Peace Lines;
The cloud smudged vistas of the sombre Lough.
At dawn I have too often been awoken
By a violent squall of mad sectarian seagulls
Swarming over oil encrusted shallows
their grey infighting flock;
The shriek of sirens;
The departure of the ferries from the dock.
None of these scenes are foreign to me now,
But sometimes when I wander out alone
Through the glass and concrete city centre
I think that I can hear your light heeled footsteps
Tapping close behind me in the crowd;
The sharp edged music of your northern laughter
Skirling a ragged echo on the wind.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 6th. - 10th. 2014.
July 30th. - 31st. 2015.
August 18th. - December 20th. 2015.
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