Ordinary Love. A Poem for Jo Cox. 1974 - 2016.

It was such an ordinary love,
A young mother`s love for her children,
For her husband,
For her colleagues and her friends,
For her tiny patch of England.

But this ordinary love had made her wise,
Had helped her understand that other folk
Knew joy and pain as she did,
And shared with her a raw humanity.

This wisdom made her travel far and wide
Into the bombed out cities, war wracked lands
Far from the quiet back streets of her childhood,
The safe town she was born in.

She travelled with love burning in her heart,
Burning with the pain that others felt
When they lost their homes, their children, husbands, wives,
To jihad and systemic civil war.

She helped raped women find a home, a refuge:
Syrians find a kinder, gentler land.
Their Human Rights she shouted to the wide world,
Shouted loud,
Her Yorkshire burr eloquent with compassion.

But some folk are deaf and blind and dumb to love,
They think of little, only their good selves:
"Me First" they shriek, at neighbours and the media:
"Me First, and then to Hell with all the rest".

This good woman, she went out to help her neighbours,
The dispossessed, the victims of injustice;
The refugees left helpless at closed borders;
The poor folk knocking on her surgery door.

But one sad man, who hated all she stood for,
Now waited for her with a knife and gun
To cut her down, on a street where she felt safe,
In the quiet Yorkshire town that was her home.

One sad lonely man, blind to the tears of children
Crying for their mother in the night.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter,
June 22nd. - 23rd. 2016. 

This afternoon I joined the thousands in Trafalgar Square gathered to grieve and celebrate Jo Cox. I was moved to tears by the children singing "If I had a hammer", and the intense sad fellowship of the crowd. But I came away more hopeful than I had been when I set out; more hopeful that there are more good people in the world than I had feared. When I returned home I revised this hurriedly written poem, but I have kept the downbeat ending because the sadness has not yet left me. This afternoon I made this pledge with the tousands in the crowd, To Love Like Jo, and I ask all who read this little poem, do please do the same.