Epiphany. (Completed Version)

We don`t know how many wise men came.
Three, six, twelve?
Twelve would make sense,
The same number as Christ`s apostles,
And this the Assyrian Church has unequivocally claimed,
And yet the shrine in Cologne contains only three corpses.

But from what secret palaces, what far flung caravansaries
Did these wise men commence with ponies and camels
To trudge the bleak mountain tops, the vast trackless deserts,
To reach the bad lands of Herod the king?
The records are incomplete, the details too hazy
With much emphasis on strange moving stars,
King Herod`s paranoia,
Contemptuous Romans,
The efficacy of believing in the wildest of dreams.

And who were these sages, these cold weary travellers?
Zoroastrians from Persia? Buddhists from Sri Lanka?
                                             Gypsies from Rajasthan?

But a Messiah was deemed far greater
Than any Bodhisattva
And no foreign faiths were welcomed in Judea.
So, from whence did they come? These Stoics? These Shamans?
These Daoists? These Brahmins? These strange righteous Gentiles
To kneel in the dung spattered straw of a stable
And worship the miracle of a new born child?

Perhaps who they were does not really matter,
Only that they followed a spectacular nova
Without really knowing where it would lead them
Or what they would find at the end of the journey. -
The palace of a mighty king? - Surely not a stable?
But when they saw the infant in the arms of Mary,
Filthy with placenta, pressed tight to her shoulder,
It was the love emanating from this helpless nursling
And lighting up the eyes of his teenage mother
That made them kneel, awe struck, humbled, terrified,
And present their gifts as though to the mighty Caesar.

We have few details of their homeward journey,
Only that they kept clear of Masada,
And travelled by an undisclosed new route.
Yet surely all we need to know was written down by Matthew,
Indeed, their trust in hope is all that really matters,
That they witnessed something vital, something extraordinary,
The transfiguration of the commonplace by a mother`s love.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
23rd. - 25th. - 26th. January 2019.
6th. January 2020. - January 6th. 2021.

Trevor J Potter's Art: Two Poems. (1) Wintry Wunderland. (2) Mid January ...

Trevor J Potter's Art: Two Poems. (1) Wintry Wunderland. (2) Mid January ...:               1 .  Wintry Wunderland. A light dusting of morning snow. Icing sugar on the unswept pathways, The marooned cars. The p...

Two Poems. (1) Wintry Wunderland. Revised Version. (2) Mid January Evening, North West London.(Revised).

              1.

 Wintry Wunderland.


A light dusting of morning snow.
Icing sugar on the unswept pathways,
The marooned cars,
The privet hedges,
The winter roses,
Untidy piles of wind blown rubbish,
The sombre relics of a line of trees.
If I place a candle on the garden table,
A festal candle, gold and silver,
I can then, without much niggling trouble
Make believe
The world made new as a burnished platter
Piled high with meringues and Christmas cake.
But the cold wind blowing through my hair
whispers, "Winter is here. Despair. Despair"


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 23rd. - 26th. 2019.
              
              2.

Mid January Evening, North West London.


Milk white moon in a
Smoke blue sky.
The cruel White Goddess, both stone and ivory,
Hauling her secrets across the blank page
Of a January evening.
Frost on the fingertips of the wind.

Mid January evening in Willesden Green.
Desire and deceit,
Greed and fantasy
Bleaching the white lights in the shop windows
To blind would be shoppers
With fierce white lies.
Plastic knives and forks laid
On plastic plates and tables,
These items are perfection, they reflect the lights like silver,
And will surely never break in a million years.

Behind drawn curtains
Of mock Tudor houses
The cruel White Goddess haunts the sad bedrooms
Of on line readers of Mills and Boone.
She mocks the transitions
From adolescence to maturity,
From menopause to old age
With the cut and the thrust of impossible dreams.

Bare trees reaching up to the milk white moon
Bone thin fingers
Bent and arthritic
Imploring the Goddess to bring back springtime
When lovers hugged close beneath green branches
And the breeze was soft as a new shorn fleece.
But the Goddess is mute, she is pure stone and ivory,
She moves oblivious through smoke blue shadows,
A cold white Deity, bleached to perfection,
But fading completely in the morning sun.

I look up at the moon as I stand at the kerbside
Waiting half an hour for a two sixty bus.
She may be just a dead rock that spins round a planet
But this evening she seems both malevolent and holy.

Pale White Goddess, alone but imperturbable.

Frost on the fingertips of the wind.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 18th. - 19th. - 20th. - 21st. - 27th. 2019.

The Wave. The Month of February. (New Re-written Version).

We forget the boats
Barely buoyant in a trough of raw sea.
The giant claw of water poised above them
Dominates this blue world
Almost completely.

Still as a Buddha,
Mount Fuji,
(an afterthought of the artist
to Western eyes,
but really the calm heart of the painting),
Sanctifies the indefinite grey horizon
With its quiet perfection,
An improbable image of repose
In the midst of tumult and chaos.

We forget the boats.
The wave overpowers our traumatised senses
Like a dream of terror
Dredged from the depths of our darkest fears.
But look again,
The thirty fishermen keep to their tasks.
Their catch was good and must be got to shore.
They firmly pull on pliant oars.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 12th. - 15th. 2019.
Re-written December 5th. 2019.

Image for the month of February on my Japanese Calendar.

The Mountain Weeps. Month of January.

Blue moon with white waves;
The mountain pool glitters and swirls.

From on high drops the waterfall,
Tears from the moon shaped pool
White in sunlight,
Blue in shadow,
Dropping to the lower pool,
Blue moon with white waves.

Three people watch the water fall,
They watch in silence
Then turn away,
Their kettle steams on the green verge.

Blue moon with white waves.
Raw tears cut through ancient stone.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 1st. 2019.

Image for the month of January by Hokusai on my Japanese Calendar.

Trevor J Potter's Art: Fernweh. (Revised).

Trevor J Potter's Art: Fernweh. (Revised).: I have never yet found my true home, I have always only been                                        "on Location", A displaced...

Fernweh. (New Ending).

I have never yet found my true home,
I have always only been
                                       "on Location",
A displaced person searching for my
                                           Soul Land
Far from the melancholy shores of
                                          England,
Or the misty time soaked forests of
                                          Fermanagh,
The frozen hilltops of far Nova Scotia.


The place I seek? Who can help me find it?
Describe it?
                    Define it?
A place so far back in time no modern
                                                 vehicle,
No smart Bugatti, no supercharged white
                                                 van,
Could speed me there along an autobahn.
 

Perhaps the home I seek does not exist,
A place where politicians are mere rumours,
A place where race and religion do not
                                                          matter
And the rich cannot afford the entrance fee.
Perhaps all that I can do is grieve like
                                                    Cinderella
Among the ashes of forsaken dreams.


Maybe I seek the Land of Lost Content,
The land before our mama ate the apple.
The land that was before I learned to walk
And still lay sleeping in my plastic cradle.
.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 28th. - 30th. 2018. - January 7th. 2019.
January 21st. 2020.