Making Lists.

Making lists is something most folk do
to try to fathom who they really are.

List A. 

I am 14 months old,
walking to Violette Szabo
across the front room carpet.

It is now my 2nd. Birthday,
plasticine tarts a disappointment,
no spitfires overhead.

I am 3 and a half, or nearly,
lifting high a huge bouquet
to a stooping Joyce Redman.

I have now turned 8 and a bit,
hearing an interesting story
of a girl who loved two sailors.

11 years and a day,
barred from playing a boy king
by a father wary of actors.

I am not yet quite 13,
and with Thorny for the first time
in a draughty gypsy wagon.

14 just come and gone,
I am singing the naughty Hansel
in Humperdinck`s Hansel und Gretel.

Now I have reached 15,
I must guide the Sugar Plum Fairy
around a stage close to the Angel.

16, my voice broke late,
like a mollusc I curl up tightly,
afraid to get up and whisper.

I am a wild and nerdy 18,
arrested by a kind policeman
for parking my seat in Whitehall.

21, a man of the world already,
writing my first love poem
to a girl I had yet to meet.

22, and with the Beatles.
Banging a tray in the studio,
or was it a tambourine?

Pause.

List B.

Fast forward through the crystal,
grey clouds smudge the pictures
that now slowly reform.

At 35, cold and wet in Ireland,
lying face down on the border,
bullets whiz over my shoulder.

A divorce. An argument with my lawyer.
Some extra mural babies
not spoken about to the neighbours.

72, grey haired and balding,
I still do not know which sailor
is my actual father.

I am 74 next Easter,
the girl in my first love poem
just called me on the phone.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 7th. 2017.