Trevor J Potter's Art: Pauline. (Completed Poem).

Trevor J Potter's Art: Pauline. (Completed Poem).: Grief lasts for a lifetime. After fifty two years I am still grieving for you. When I saw your self portrait made from stained glass I...

Intimate Music. A Love Poem. (Completed Version).

You are my closest truth

My harp 

My cello

I cleave you to my breast

And make new music with you

I am your voice

You are my real voice also

The grace notes

Our inner melody

Our Song of Songs

Our Psalms

When I touch the notes awake

Truly I become you

And you become me also

You are all that makes love real

My harp

My cello

I cleave you to my life

And make true music with you

Never a discordant interval

Never a note out of place

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

October 30th. November 2nd. 2021.

My true love is both harp and cello, depending on the time of day.

All Hallows Eve.

Struggling light. Twilight dissolves the day

Deep into mists of memory.

I watch the sunset darkening the garden,

Draining the autumnal colours of that vivacity

Death lends to the edge of life.

A black wall denser than the darkest night

Descends, separating the mild months from old

                                                                 winter

With an almost fatal finality.

We cannot step back through the wall to summer,

Time is a one way ticket however hard we argue.

The leaves are beginning to drop, cover the asphalt

                                                                      path

With a moist carpet slippery as ice floes,

Next April almost implied by their transient beauty.

Beneath the fallen leaves a pile of surgical masks,

Used once, then quietly dumped without due care

By families walking to and from the school.

Their pale blue makes me fear the sky may fall.

I will never stoop to clear away these masks,

They reference undisclosed infections

Known only to the people who have worn them.

I open the front door, it is time to re-enter the house.

My supper is already cooked, I have only to reheat it.

I wipe my feet on the mat, but keep on my surgical mask

Before I know for certain I am alone.

In the quiet of the evening I imagine footsteps behind me.

Friend or foe? - Neighbour or would be thief?

The street lights flick on suddenly their silver tinted dawn.

My shadow glides before me into the hall.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

October 27th. - 28th. 2021.

I have always found the few days at the end of October and the beginning of November to be wierdly claustrophobic. A time shadowed by regrets.

Trevor J Potter's Art: Pauline. (Revised Poem).

Trevor J Potter's Art: Pauline. (Revised Poem).: Grief lasts for a lifetime. After fifty two years I am still grieving for you. When I saw your self portrait made from stained glass I...

Trevor J Potter's Art: Family Photographs..

Trevor J Potter's Art: Family Photographs..: These photographs are merely cheap paper icons, Mementoes to hang up on a wall,  display in a book. Mementoes that fade in a decade or tw...

Pauline Remembered. (Revised).

I will show you the photographs

But they can only give you a false impression.

Pre-digital cameras were not able to reveal

The delicate patterns flicked over her flawless skin

When winter sunlight filtered through high windows

And woke us from deep sleep.

The small hints of a mood change in her thoughtful eyes

Could perhaps be replicated by an artist

On canvas or on paper,

But the cameras that we used in the nineteen sixties

Were far too clumsy, the shutters far too slow

To register such delicate shifts in mood,

The sudden laughter and smiles - followed by a kiss.

Therefore these photographs can only hint at

The love that was so private, so much of who we were

In those two short years that we spent together -

Before she died of cancer - aged just twenty eight.

But I still recall the tenderness of her fingers

Stroking my face and fidgeting my hair

When I bent forward to kiss her on the shoulder

With that shy tenderness only young folk show.

And sometimes I can almost touch her in the dark

As though she were alive in the room beside me

In the quiet moments before I fall asleep. -

That is only wishful thinking, I try to tell myself,

But sometimes her voice seems closer than my heartbeats.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

February 21st. - 22nd. 2019. - October 19th. 2021.

Although we knew each other for nine years, it was only during the last two or three years of her life that we drew close together.

Recalling Two Artists, Pauline and Sharon.

Broken shards of porcelain litter 

The back lots of my life.

Two loves I thought would last a lifetime

Lost to ruthless history.

Two flawless porcelain figurines

Smashed in the yard at the furnace door.

Even the photographs I am left with

Fading on the kitchen wall.

Memories disintegrate into shadow,

Become unreal, detached from life,

Become like scattered porcelain shards

Too wrecked to be fixed back together.

And friends who die, have died forever,

We cannot recall them - with love - with tears.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

14th. October 2021.

Trevor J Potter's Art: My Home Is Europe. (ReWritten Poem)

Trevor J Potter's Art: My Home Is Europe. (ReWritten Poem): Once upon a time I had a dream.  I dreamed Europe was a single country,  No borders to cross,  No passports needed,  Every European an equal...

Trevor J Potter's Art: My Home Is Europe. (New Poem)

Trevor J Potter's Art: My Home Is Europe. (New Poem): Once upon a time I had a dream.  I dreamed Europe was a single country,  No borders to cross,  No passports needed,  Every European an equal...

It Takes Two to Dream.- A Lyric.

I dreamt of you all night

But we have never met

Only spoken on the telephone.

I dreamt of you all night.

Perhaps we could be partners

If we meet - Or useful friends -

Or simply wave across a busy street.

I dreamt of you all night.

Is that your face

Outside my bedroom window

Or just a trick of the morning light?

Would I recognise you if we meet?

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

October 5th. 2021.

Maiko Beach, Harima Province, October. (Completed Version).

Storms and earthquakes stretched the trees

Into shattered hands scratching at a sky

Wounded by the dying light

Of a cold October sun. I enter this picture

                                                       at dusk

Just like Alice drifting through the mirror,

Dissolving the skin thick glass of perception

With outstretched hands that reach out for

                                                     the prize

Of a more interesting world than the one we

                                                         live in.

A maze would be far easier to negotiate than

                                                   this forest,

I find that every path is blocked by gnarled

                                              trunks of trees

And their ancient interlaced branches.

The pale blue bay remains a hazy mirage,

Slowly darkening as the dusk comes on,

Four minutes earlier each October evening.

I planned that the distant boats should be my 

                                                          rescuers,

But now they must remain forever out of reach,

Two small sails heading to the far shore

Where the grass, of course, is greener.

I step back from the picture and rub my eyes.

Like Alice I have to come to terms with life

Now that the sun has set, and my world shrinks

                                                back to one room

In the narrow shell of a suburban semi detached.

But why can I now see people and their houses

In that painted wood, that I failed to see before?

Perhaps my terms of reference were too shallow.

Perhaps I only saw what I wanted to see.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

1st. - 2nd. October 2021.

Poem No. 10. Hiroshige print illustrating October in my 2021 Calendar.