Blackthorn Snow.

                       Blackthorn Snow.

Blackthorn snow, sudden, but not inconsequential. 

Unexpected storms break the rhythm of the year,

Especially in March.

I walk across the white hills searching for a trace

Of your introspective smile

                                             - Of your bell like voice

 In the wind shaken trees - in cloud shadows 

                                                        skidding over

The moist springtime snow.

My footsteps are the only ones that mark this path.

All around me I see blankness.

It was at Easter I first met you.

Easter nineteen sixty four.

You walked into the cafe and offered me an apple

From your knitted bag,

                                     (Your bag of tricks I named it).

You were only fourteen, but seemed five years older.

I was barely twenty one, naive and full of talk.

We spent hours discussing Braque and Dostoevsky,

The existential dramas of Sarte.

That day was nearly sixty years ago now,

In a very different city, a different century, a different

                                                             millennium.

A time far more honest than today. Far more intellectual.

(Perhaps I am growing old, but hope now seems grotesque,

                            a clown with rotted teeth and matted hair.

We then had Kennedy, that tragic morning star).

Our friendship lasted almost forty six years,

But then you crumbled beneath the surgeons knife,

A blazing light too easily extinguished, too quickly

                                                            turned to ash.

I walk across the white hills calling out your name.

There will not now be an answer.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 

March 25th. - 26th. - 27th. - 28th. 2021.

For Zoe Harris, gone ten years already

Trevor J Potter's Art: The Unexpected Gift. (New Poem).

Trevor J Potter's Art: The Unexpected Gift. (New Poem).: Until then we had lodged in small bedsits, Loners who steered clear of strangers; Who hated fairgrounds and parties; Dance halls and pu...

Crescent Moon in March. (New Version).

Whispering into the hollow shell of my viola

I remember the last time we spent together

And try to fill the empty hours with music.

The pain warped cadences of Beethoven`s

Final string quartet,

Crafted out of solitude and sickness,

Echo indistinctly from the record player

In an adjoining room.

I place my viola back inside its case,

My music seems a fraud compared to Beethoven`s.

Tonight we are in the company of angels,

Or so I dare imagine.

They fly between us on silent wings,

Conveying coded messages that we alone decipher

In the privacy of our dreams.

They seem to feel the full hurt of our separation

As we wait out the wistful evening hours.

Until I met you I did not believe in angels,

I thought that they were optical illusions

Observed by Coptic hermits

Fasting in remote and hostile places.

I thought these saints were driven mad by loneliness,

By mouldy bread or brackish drinking water,

But now I must self isolate, kept indoors by covid,

The hidden presence of our guardian angels

Seems as real as music.

Tonight the moon is an indistinct white crescent,

A desert moon marred by the English mists,

Febrile mists dissolving truth and clarity. -

The ambivalent final chords of the string quartet,

 Echo through the house - and then the silence.

I turn off the lights. I crave a clearer view

Of the westward drift of the shadow patterned moon

Above suburban rooftops.

I hope that you can also watch the moon,

From the enforced sanctuary of your hospital bed.

I retrieve my viola from its wooden case.

For the first time since the fall that nearly killed you

I can play the tune I wrote the day we met.

In the depths of my mind I hear you call my name.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

March 3rd. - May 12th. 2020. - March 20th. - 21st. 2021.

This is a complete of a poem that I found very hard to write at first. This, I think, is the finished version.

The simplicities and complexities of Beethoven`s final string quartet have remained in my mind while I have been trying to complete this poem. I wrote it for a lovely person I have been unable to meet for far too long. The viola represents my singing voice, silenced because of covid.

View of Mount Fuji from Koshigaya Province.

Mount Fuji dominates the quiet landscape,

A savage white god breaking through the sward

From the shadow lands,

The ring of molten stones

Buried deep beneath the fields and houses,

The plum trees bright with flowers.

Several times a day the pathway shudders

Beneath the sandalled feet of the travellers

Reminding them that all they see is frail, is transient,

Even the savage white god

Shimmering in the sun.

From time to time they stop by the waters edge

To watch a boat slowly drifting by,

The oarsman standing tall, alert as a watchful heron.

Far to the south, on the edge of the inland sea,

The Naruto whirlpools roar between two shores.

The oarsman will never sail his boat that far,

He has other things on his mind.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

March 17th. 2021.

Hiroshige Prints, Poem No.4. The month of April.

Trevor J Potter's Art: Pocahontas. (New Part 3 added to Complete Poem)

Trevor J Potter's Art: Pocahontas. (New Part 3 added to Complete Poem):                                       1 Just saying your name is enough  Pocahontas.   A name that means more than ordinary love            ...

A Gift of Wings.

Dear Miss Price, 

Do not reject this surprise gift of wings,

They once belonged to a genuine

                            Guardian Angel

Who now, at 65, has packed her bags &

                   taken out her pension

& moved house to somewhere due south

                                            west of Eden.

She no longer needs them to speed her

                                            on her way,

From vistas beyond Andromeda to

                                      Clapton Common,

From Aix-en-Provence to Hendon Central,

From Prague to Hackney Wick;

There have often been a number of unexpected

                                                 destinations

For a hard working Guardian Angel to pay

                                                          a visit.

But now she has earned her bus pass she would like

                                               to shed her pinions

& gift them to you on your nineteenth birthday

So you can smash your cage & ride the restless winds.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

March 12th. 2021.

Pocahontas. (New Part 3 added to Complete Poem)

                                     1

Just saying your name is enough 

Pocahontas.  

A name that means more than ordinary love

                                                   can promise;

More than the solace that every human craves,

Seeks in the lonely cities,

The concrete streets of solitude.

The midnight streets of London, New York, Paris.

Your sanitized image, splashed over cinema screens,

Has done you a great disservice.

                                      2

The forests you roamed when a child are not

                                                    even named

On the memory maps we draw with the aid of

                                                            dreams

Invoking a lost world deep buried beneath

                                                      plantations;

The scars from the plough; the footprints of

                                                              slaves.-

An ancestor of mine wed you, thus gaining a

                                                               status

Greater than he expected in the chronicles of

                                                      Jamestown.

But it was you who made the difference, not

                                                       John Rolfe

With his tobacco seeds, thieved from Trinidad

Under the guns of the Spanish.

Your tears brought peace, clarity, forgiveness,

When you knelt before the Chief and saved a

                                                                   life.

                                     3.                                                                   

You knelt before your Chief in the forest glades,

Your tears of coexistence, of tender understanding,

Doused malicious fires - silenced guns and drums,

Brought peace throughout the short term of your

                                                               marriage

Between the stubborn English and Powhatan.

But of course the colonists could not keep faith,

They fenced in the sacred land and started conflicts

That killed not just one man, but whole families of

                                                                      nations.

The London winter did for Pocahontas.

Her husband fell beneath a tomahawk blow.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

March 2nd. - 3rd. - 4th. - 12th. - 15th. - 16th. 2021.

I did not discover for certain that I am related, on my mother`s side of the family, to John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas. It now seems very strange to me that in my early twenties my then girlfriend was descended from John Rolfe on her father`s side of her family. I find this coincidence extraordinary.