Mill Hill. (Plus Note to Poem).

I love to walk in these fields at midnight,
Feel the earth breathing beneath my feet,
A stressed out mother deep in slumber.

I love to sit still on the south facing slope,
Watch galaxies pulse through magical skies,
A trillion heart beats in the tumult of space.

I love especially the warm June nights
When I can hear wandering foxes cry
Across distances only the fiercest would travel.

This is my dream time, private and holy,
When I can look further than daylight allows,
Or sense the depths lost far beneath silence
Where linger the ghosts of ancestral voices:

Ancestors who farmed where executives` houses
Now litter the fields where hay was once scythed,
And Wilberforce built his plain little church.

I love to walk in these fields at midnight,
The slope overlooks where the farm once nestled
Among English Elms taller than spires.

But the trees have all gone, and the grand little houses
Huddle together, row upon row,
Like strangers lost in the promised land.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
August 1966. - May 5th. - 6th. - 9th. 2018.

Note to Poem. This poem remains very much an example of the style that I was trying to achieve in the nineteen sixties when I was close to the London Hippies, but never fully integrated into their life style. While approving their interest in communal living and mysticism, I was critical of their lazy thinking and the taking of mind altering drugs. I sketched the prototype to this poem in 1966, but could never pull the various strands together to weave a completed picture. It was only when I discovered that members of my mothers` family had farmed fields on what is now the edge of the green belt to the north of London that I was given a context in which to place my ideas. They farmed the land as far back as the earliest years of the nineteenth century, and witnessed the building of St. Paul`s Church that was founded by William Wilberforce  because the handful of local villagers were having to walk several miles to attend the Sunday services. The suburban housing that encroached on the heights of Mill Hill in the first forty years of the twentieth century, seem banal and out of place in the context of the remaining fields and the ragged clumps of trees and bushes.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter. May 9th. 2018.