Backstreet Garden West Hendon.

I look out of the bedroom window at my garden,
A postage stamp of green
Stuck on a large square of concrete
Hemmed in by high brick walls;
A letter going no where.
I share this tiny space with wasps and woodlice,
Ants, worms, slugs, escargot, the occasional butterfly.
Once in a while a bee inspects the weeds and loganberries,
The roses taller than an average man.

I look up at the sun, a rare visitor to this scruffy bit of garden,
And watch its slow trajectory over roof tops,
The vandalised cherry trees.
An average star deep in the multiverse
Around which our planet hovers like a moth
Addicted to heat and guaranteed luminescence.
An average star once worshipped by Attic Greeks
As handsome Helios guiding unruly steeds.

Greek mythology still dazzles my imagination
As powerfully as when a child I read at school
A simplified text of Homer
That cut out all the gods and naughty bits.
I dote on visual images, not incontrovertible equations,
That is why the Attic Greeks made perfect sense
To a child who would rather paint than do his sums,
And had a taste for Keats, Shakespeare and Shelley.

My garden only catches the evening sun
When our ageing star is dipping in the west
En route to the hills of California,
Not the deeps of Okeanos and a well earned night in bed.
This patch of ground is so tiny, so inconsequential,
That passers by hardly notice it exists
When rushing to and fro from home to work,
Or making a bee line for the Claddagh Ring.
But I can sit outside in the golden hour of light
And read The White Goddess, The Guardian, Salman Rushdie,
The Bible, early Marx, my Homer with the suitors put back in.
Or set my telescope up at 9 o`clock - upon the garden table -
And look towards Andromeda, or the russet face of Mars.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 18th. 2018.