Schooled by Cinema.

                      1

You teach us with machines
Wars imagery,
Projecting through dark halls transparent dead,
Their days of terror refined
To a grey grain.
Blood, black spots on flat figures
Sprawled across backgrounds
Of merged perspectives.

We accept
Presentable profiles turned
From the sun the camera used,
Young fingers trapped in grey sand
As shells bang black and white.

These are the facts we glean
As we relax in the big black box you provided
Consuming our popcorn
With enthusiasm.

Eyes bright with concentration
We sample the gory details.

                    2.

Taught by Machines  MACHINES  MACHINES 
We study these victims falling
To deaths long since experienced;
Jaws loose, arms extended
signalling defeat.

We thrill to their defeat.

Their young flesh burned and furrowed;
Their clear eyes glazed, then shuttered;
Their fine wits drilled and hollowed
By precision made machines.

These celluloid soldiers embrace
A vacuum of fallacies.

                   3.

Dear teachers, what`s the point?
Why wont you tell?
Lacking the scope for contention
You spew out
Facts  FACTS  FACTS 
That are only abstractly defined,

Blind logic to hoodwink the mind?

Grey truths that can`t be refined?

Confined by concentration, then
Conforming to subtle images
Our vision narrows sharply.

                  4.

Do you extol a mans brilliance in battle
Or here condemn the banalities of war?

Do these grey documents contain
An insight into our future?

Is life just a limbo of images?
Dare we look beyond the images?

Are we merely the slaves to our future?
Blind shadows adrift in the night?

Our fears being real,
Our culture, a balance of mysteries,
Will we be thus exposed to grey oblivion
When our sun grows colder,
Outshone by brighter light?

Dear teachers, where is truth?
Why wont you tell?

You do not reply.

You are busy projecting the films.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
August 18th. 1966. - April 21st. 2008. 
5th. poem in series of Poems in Times of War. 

Although this was the first poem in this series to be composed, 
it completes the cycle which should be read as a single work in
five sections. 

Babes in Arms. The Dark Legacies of Total War. (Revised).

                         1.

Seven little words
repeated with an understated reverence.

Shoah 
Porajmos 
Holocaust 

                 Dachau 
                 Buchenwald 
                 Auschwitz 

Birkenau 

Black smoke swirling
Snake like into the sky

Schutzstaffel        SS       

Words whispered in darkness,
A canticle of death:
The hiss of the snake
Entering a darkened room,
All the windows blackened,
The shutters barred at night
With interlaced barbed wire.

Live snakes interlocked on broken glass; 
A parable of loss,
Despair beyond reason.  


                          2.

& Now,
              in another country,
At another time,
This nightmare of war, a popular TV fiction,
Revised, fleshed out, worked over,
Put on to bolster the schedules: -

                                                    & here,
Right through the night
& Safe at home, I stare into the eyes of long dead soldiers.
They parade, tall pallid Titans, through silent streets
& burnt out city centres, knives in belts, machine guns at the ready: -

Scuffed images captured by the newsreel cameras
Flashed up onto my plasma TV screen
To the sound of martial music.

Gaunt families crawling out of derelict houses,
Into a desert that was once their city.

Sad babies clutched to breasts now cold as winter;
Their fingers curled up tight like withered branches.

Old men waiting in line among the ruins
For a short truck ride to an unknown destination.

Press footage shot with an eye to the morning headlines.
Press footage shot without much love or pity.

The grainy newsreel cuts to another scene;
Soldiers handing sweets to starving children
Under a dark architrave of guns.

                             Filmed from above
At a discreetly fastidious angle,  The
results resembled a stylised Hollywood
Show; An awkward monochrome ballet
Conceived, at a moments notice, Without
much trouble, by a senior film technician.

                             3.

The soldiers dance like cobras in the sun,
Playing so deftly with the hungry children
That the children fear to move, scared to
                                                  sacrifice
One second of this deadly magic show,
                                                 this bleak
charade, and return to their shelters in the
                                                 rubble,
Their makeshift tents of stone.

The soldiers mime sweet arabesques of love,
Sprawled in the ooze,   the carcass of a dove.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
January 30th. - February 5th. - 9th.- March 2nd. - 4th.  2013.
11th. September 2013. Revised February 11th. 2016.

4th. poem in sequence of Poems in Times of War.

I think this poem has relevance in respect of events taking place in Europe in 2015 - 2016. 


(A footnote to Babes In Arms).

                  1971.

The soldiers clown the arabesques of love,
Sprawled in the ooze, the carcass of a dove.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
January 26th. 1972.

A Winter of Holocausts. Revised Version).

Winter moon,
Scythe cutting the evening sky,
White light
Shone through a torn curtain;
Far space overwhelms the Earth,
A fleck of dust in the vastness.

Ice on the road home
Glittering in the moonlight
A stark warning.
I tread warily
Head bowed
Hands thrust in sleeves.
It was much like this in February 45,
The Russians close to Berlin,
London still in darkness,
North Eastern France in flames.
Much ruined to no real purpose.

And now this snow bound February night,
In an insular town
In a self congratulatory country,
A full lifetime after the guns were silenced,
I sit and mourn for all that has been lost
From this troubled world,
This speck of rock
That we dare to call our home.

Whole cities razed.
Whole cultures lost.
The Polish cantor burned in a barn.
The Lithuanian professor
Frozen in irons.
Our family friend
Shot dead in Ravensbruck,
Shot dead for no real reason.

Nothing remained,
Nothing for us to touch,
Only her photograph
Placed on an empty coffin,
An insignificant box
Shadowed by memories.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
28th.- 30th. January 2013. revised February 17th. 20i3.

Written in response to the 2013 Holocaust Memorial Day. 
I have made a pilgrimage to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.
3rd. poem in sequence of Poems in Times of War.

The Girl Who Came to Tea, A Childhood Memory of Wartime London. A Threnody for Violette Szabo.

My mother and her sister left the room
Closing the door behind them,
But I was more fortunate,
I was allowed to stay there,
Cosy and warm in a safe place,
A small child in the corner
Playing on the floor.
Violette sat talking seriously with my grandmother
At the table by the window,
A beautiful young woman
Buoyed up by excitement and real pride.
My grandmother treated her with a greater natural respect
Than the smart naval officer who sometimes came to call.
I knew that she was exceptional, an unusually important visitor,
But my infant mind just could not work out why;
I assumed she was a member of the family.
She was fiercely serious, considerate, but also fun,
She seemed to carry happiness in her pocket, a gift for friend and stranger,
And she lit up the dowdy room with her bright young smile,
I felt privileged to be there
In her company.
Violette stayed quite late, apparently without a care, just passing the time of day
With cups of tea and cakes from the family shop.
Then suddenly she stepped forward, stooping and laughing, lifted me high up out of my sanctuary
On the polished linoleum floor,
And for that moment we had become almost equal, wild frenetic playmates
Romping by the fireside in the chilly wartime house.
But so soon she had to leave us, stepping briskly into the black-out,
The wind tugging the ancient Plane trees. An air raid siren howling into the dark.
I gave way to an aching sadness,
A cold mood of foreboding I was too young to comprehend.
"Never forget that girl", my grandmother whispered,
As we watched her walk away
Across the unlit street,
"She is very very special, 
Some time you will understand this, but not today,
Just never forget that we are lucky to know her". 
And now, more than sixty years later
I know just how special she was,
And how precious that evening was for her
Amidst the catastrophe of war.
A week or two later she flew back into France
On her second secret mission.
This time the Gestapo got her. She kept silent under torture.
They machine gunned her against a prison wall.
No ashes remained to send back home to England.-
But although at that time I was only a very small child
I have still not forgotten, nor will I ever forget
Her sweetly infectious smile,
Her cheeky South London laughter.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 17th.-22nd. January 2013. 
For Violette Szabo, the bravest of the brave. My grandmother never fully got over her death.
2nd. poem in sequence of Poems in Times of War.

"

Alma.of Sarajevo.

The most beautiful smile in the world-
The smile of a pregnant woman,
Shy, ecstatic, playful;
The roses pressed to her heart
Bereft of thorns.

She has almost forgiven the soldier who killed her brother,
Almost, but not entirely.
The ruins concealing snipers are now just ruins;
Wild flowers have sprung up under the broken walls.
She stoops in silence, displaying a simple formality,
And lays the roses gently upon his tomb.

Concealed in darkness
Her unborn infant
turns and kicks
with abrupt power.
The mother stares half blind at ice white grave stones
And grabs her stomach to kill the sudden pain.
Her cry makes desolate the quiet spaces.

 Visceral terror swiftly subsides
But carves a wound that will for all time scar her
Deep, unyielding.
The memory of the day that she was shot
And clubbed with rifle butts by rebel soldiers
Is, strangely, somehow easier to live with
Than these ferocious seconds of foetal pain.

It is now ten years since the fighting ceased.
Hugging her pregnant belly
She turns to leave the hillside cemetery
And begins the long slow climb back to her home.

The crack of a dead branch breaking could be gunfire.

Instinctively she bows her head and runs,
Just like her brother ran the day he died
Caught in the mountains that circle Sarajevo.

Ancient pines conceal the path in shadow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
11th.- 12th.-24th. January. - March 8th.  2013.
Rewritten August 28th. - 30th. 2014.

For all the brave women who have suffered in wartime.

1st. poem in sequence of  Poems in Times of War

Child in the Crowded Subway, Winter Snapshots.

Seldom a face of true beauty
At ease in a quicksand of crowds

Dead leaves cover the garden
Sun squints between massed clouds

The land locked gulls are crying


Trevor John Karsavin Potter
December 13th. 1971 - January 8th. 2013.

Emergency Ward Wasp, an Urban Adventure.

...............enters the Study
Wasp 
Unzipping the quiet spaces
With a curt buzz,
A snide bell intermittently ringing.

I am stung into action,
The Skull and Cross Bones
Now come to mind;
The pirate loops the loop.

Iron invades my soul.
The cat looks on from a safe distance.

A brass weight snatched by sweaty fingers:
A square of wall crumbles to dust:
My shoes turn white.
I had imagined a sabre splitting hairs,
Not this plummeting rubble.

The cat spins like a broken Top
Flaying the carpet.

Electric wires fizzle and pop:
Smartly the safety catch is thrown
Instigating silence.

The thermometer has lost several degrees
In less than a minute.
I carefully put down the brass weight,
Then return to my book.

The cat stretches her paws and yawns.

A small wing flickers.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter

October 24th. 2012 - January 6th. 2013. (First sketched May 20th. 1973)