Halloween London 1969 - 2015. (New Vesion).

Sitting in the window seat
Reading Anne Sexton
London far below me

Pre online hegemony
Frost bright and bustling
Whole neighbourhoods one family

Kids itching to throw bangers
Dogs barking in a doorway
Trick or Treat unheard of.

This culture now dismantled,
Outmaneuvered by the wealthy
Fabricating Paradiso.

This town where folk once chattered
On buses,                   On the subway,
          (Not blindly into smart phones,
           Their toddler sized computers,
           But blithely face to face),
Now pimped in paint for tourists,
          (Who never speak to strangers),
Now buried deep as Pompeii

Or dwarfed by plate glass canyons,
The pomp of sky blue citadels
Devised to harvest money.
Trick or Treat writ large.

I sit here in the window seat
And dream of my lost city
That housed both rich and poor.
A town where folk said "pardon me"
When hustling through the markets
Pre keep in touch technology,

Not "OUT MY WAY"            Not "Sorry"


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 31st. - November 1st. 2015.

A Song for Winter.

Sleep garden sleep
Under your duvet of leaves,
Winter is a short season,
Wink twice and it is done.

In February the snowdrops
Welcome the frost white sun.

Sleep garden sleep
Under your duvet of leaves,
Dreams only last a short while,
They drift like smoke on the wind.

February is the lunar month,
No sooner born than gone.

Sleep garden sleep
Under your duvet of leaves.
The shortest day flicks by in a trice,
A glimmer of light through a blind.

December and old January
Plod by in one single night.

Winter dreams are flickering shadows
That deliquesce in February light.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 29th. 2015.

Parliament Hill Fields Revisited. (New Ending).

Those kids you wrote about had hardly noticed you.
You were just a woman standing on a hill
Notebook in hand,
Perhaps a shopping list or the day to day accounts.

You seemed so much like any other adult,
Peering deep into your thoughts, your face a blank,
And distinctly unconnected with the moment
They completely occupied.

This stillness did not stop them in their tracks,
In fact it made no mark at all, no simple glyph;
You were just part of the landscape that they owned,
An object to ignore, to quickly shuffle passed
Or brusquely nudge aside.

Your history was far from simple, far from dull.
A mother snatching an hour of peace and quiet
To observe the post war city, the battered human hive
Of bombed out streets and terraces, of skeletal building sites,
Spread wide in skeins of mist below the park.

But it was not the view that occupied your thoughts,
The embryo of a poem, conceived from signs and soundbites,
Was forming street wise stories in your head;
Stories that spoke of children, alive and dead.

Those school girls in the park have grown quite old now,
And your poem has been fifty years in print.
I suspect that few recall that classroom outing,
It was just another field trip after all;
A lesson out of doors.

And you, my friend, a silent windblown presence
Mourning a stillborn child you seldom name,
Watched, through glacial grief, these restless infants
Swarming down Kite Hill, under the eye of teacher,
Her tongue a clamour of stings.

Soon they were out of sight, their voices lost
Deep in the thrum of traffic, the clatter of trains.
Losing the light, you check your notes, add changes,
Scribble remarks. The poem will be simpler now,
Those fractious children have redeemed the height
On which you stand and grieve.
Thinking on this, you start the short walk home.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
12th. - 20th. May. - 26th. 27th. October 2015.
Final part rewritten, January 26th. - 27th. 2018. 
This poem is about the ordinary and the extraordinary relating on a day to day level. 

(1). Pomegranate. (2) A Couple of Dark Quips..

                 1.


       Pomegranate.



I split the pomegranate in two,
and then the blood of the angels touched my lips
with a taste both sweet and bitter,
so like your greeting kiss
when we meet.

Never for more than an hour or two
can you settle
in the old rocking chair in my kitchen
by the door with a view of the yard.

Eschewing the king sized bed, the plush armchair, the old sofa,
you honour this homemade item because it is rough and well loved.
Here you can sit while we argue
by the pine wood kitchen table
like cats on the garage roof,
and sometimes even make love.

This is your way with the world,
the quirky route you have always traveled
since you clung to the skirts of your mother
with an innocents` desperate fingers
while she struggled from barroom to blackout.

She taught you to keep moving on
to any number of roadside locations
A van ride up the A One,
and then, without phoning, returning
when the loneliness gets far too much
or the pickings begin to grow scarce.

Loneliness is a dark raw wound,
a hurt very few can live with.
So perhaps at the hour you come knocking
child in tow, baggage piled by the gatepost,
to announce you are now here to stay
for a lifetime, not just part of one day,

I will not lock you out;
and if this blood red fruit is in season,
this bitter sweet gift from the angels,
I will carefully cut one into segments
and proffer the choicest slice.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 23rd. - 24th. 2015.

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

                 2

A Couple of Dark Quips. 

                 a

Just Once in a Lifetime



My wedding day?

A tear on the edge of my memory.

                 ---


                   b

    Blessing the Globe.



A spade of horse shit and a corn dolly?

This combination should really bring on the clowns.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 25th. 20115.

Chinese Porcelain.

Reflected in the mirror behind us
As we set up another selfie,
The collection of earthenware pots
Displayed on the highest shelf
Above the worktop in my kitchen,
Delicate Chinese porcelain
Placed next to Irish stoneware
Rough as the Antrim hills.

And I wonder, as we peer at the photographs
Flashed up on the miniature screen
Held tentatively in your fingers,
That such a roughcast face as mine
Thumbed out of the clays of London
Does not seem an incongruous partner
To the gracefully sculpted contours
Of your refined Parisian beauty.

My smile looks discrete, self effacing,
While yours bursts out of the picture
Like the image of the golden star
Emblazoned on the sacred Oriflamme.
I turn and look up at the porcelain
That once seemed so perfect to me,
And note how the finest of glazes
Can be flecked with miniscule flaws.

Perhaps I should now replace them
With artifacts of your choosing.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 19th. - 21st. 2015. 

September 7th. 2014. (Revised).

The hushed day slumbers.

Sunlight ricochets off white walls
and stings my tired eyes without mercy.
Almost out of sight my neighbour`s cat
mimics sleep in a clump of grass.

The first Sunday of September,
a day set apart for an archaic ritual,
the baptism of a firebrand baby.

Inside the church the drifting incense
made my skin feel dry and dirty. -
Outside the heat sizzles off wide pavements
scorched into glass by the slanting sun.

I lean against the old lychgate
sipping a cup of ice cold coffee.
I note how empty the street has become
now the congregation has prayed and gone.

Deep in the thicket that shades the churchyard
a squabble of birds ricochet through branches
watched by the cat with steel blue eyes.
A few red leaves fall like confetti.


Deep in my bag the Blackberry rings,
it is time to go home and cook the dinner,
but a love of the past keeps me captive here
mesmerised, as though in a West End Theatre,
by a world to which I do not belong.

A strict timetable rules my life,
and I try to think why we cling to rituals
when the natural world is packed with wonders;
then I notice the cat bustling through the thicket,
her small mouth grips a ball of feathers.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 7th. 2014.
September 20th. - 30th. - October 11th. - 12th. 2015.
August 20th. - September 6th.2016.

This is a poem about the moods generated by a stifling hot day in late summer, not about ideas. Thoughts just drift through the mind as though the writer is not fully awake.

Early October 2015. (Revised).

It`s that time of year again.

Slugs in the pantry.
Snails underfoot.
The cracking of shells on moist evenings.
Dogs staring at an enlarged moon.

From time to time
a spider`s web will catch us off guard,
snagging a fine tangle of old lace
over scared faces
as though we were giant flies,
fit food for arachnids.

The nights are cold underworlds
unlit by frail stars
smudged by passing clouds.
We walk home slowly,
heads bowed into the drab dark
of deserted streets
razored by black rain.
This darkness overwhelms us,
cuts us to the quick.
It is more intense than the bleakest night
of the recent drowned out summer.

You name this season autumn,
the sad weeks haunted by Hades,
the days of the blood red leaf.

But I name this time the new spring,
the season of quiet beginnings
evolving deep in the earth,

the new year lurching towards birth
under our mud clogged footsteps

as we struggle back home in the dark.



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 8th. - 9th. 2015.

Leila (Revised Version).

1969.

Chorus:

Even we peaceniks adored her.
Even we pacifists loved her pure zeal.

So beautiful
She paid a surgeon to carve her face
Into a mask more commonplace
So that she could not be recognised,

So that she would not be known
For the icon she once was,
The flight 840 hijacker.

Hair wrapped in a keffiyeh
And holding a kalashnikov rifle
In her delicate feminine hands -
(An AK she never fired in anger),
Our fierce Palestinian Angel,
The girl snuggled up to her gun
In that refined, but frightening photo.

An image of cultural resilience.

A girl forced to battle unreason,
A girl forced to make a stand
When zealots stormed over her country
And stole her ancestral land.

A dream of the outcast made free.

Chorus

Even her detractors absolved her
From the anger they forced her to feel.
Even we pacifists loved her.
The Press made her into a star.


2015.            Coda.

Chorus.

That was a long time ago.
Since then there has been too much fighting.
Since then far too many deaths.
Too many men who would kill for an acre,
For a misinterpretation of The Bible,
"Love thy neighbour" put on the back burner.
The women left at home to cook supper.
The children shot down in the street.

But once a dream has been crafted
It cannot be unmade
But must remain intact
Within our memories,

The light of inspiration
Burning deep within ourselves
To guide our hope filled lives,
To sanction aspiration

Although the template is lost,
Although the image lies broken,
A relic of former times

Dropped in the desert sand

Strafed in the ruins of Gaza.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 27th. - 28th. - 29th. - October 2nd. 2015.

This poem is partly influenced by my reading of The Oresteia, as well as the famous photograph of the young Leila Khaled, taken before she underwent surgery, a deed of great unselfishness.