My Grandmother`s Pictures.

The kettle had steamed up the kitchen window,
And I was reminded of the London fogs
Made magic by Monet, his old eyes laughing
At the dance of sunlight on flecks of anthracite
Shimmering through the cold still air.
He observed autumnal reds and yellows
Dissolving into mottled greyness,
A washed out greyness, so like those prints
Of Raphael`s tapestries owned by my grandmother.

The whole of my childhood compressed into filmic
Scenes that flashed on the screen of my mind
Like psychic visions, a split second clarity
Shining a spotlight deep into my past.
I recalled my grandmother dusting the teak frames
That embellished those prints, prints loved more than life
Because they kept her in touch with her childhood.

Her prayerbook, stored somewhere in my bookcase,
Is filled with Anglo Catholic markers
Given out free in the eighteen eighties
When she toed the line, minding the household rules.
Then she never played out with her friends on a Sunday
But stayed indoors by the coal fire reading
Christian almanacs, no novelettes allowed.
Yet, when I was a kid in the nineteen fifties,
Free wheeling my tricycle round her patio
Like a street theatre artiste out of control,
The radio had outmoded strict Sunday observance
And Christ was an artwork pressed behind glass.

This morning, when the kettle steamed up the window,
I had suddenly recalled the power that those prints
Had exerted over my pre-teen curiosity.
I was then accounted too childish and volatile
To wander the halls of the great V & A,
The Science Museum my Easter day out.-
Lost for words I stared for hours at the faded
Cartoon of the Miraculous Draft of Fishes,
And all the colours the years had washed out
Seemed to shimmer more brightly the longer I looked.

And ever since then I have lived each moment
Alert to the beauty obscured beneath shadow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 15th. - 16th. 2016 - September 17th. 2017.
Extended and re-written January 16th. - 22nd. 2018.