(1) A Poem is.... Written in fond memory of my Parisian aunt who revealed to me the glories of Gothic Art and of French Poetry. (2) Beauvais Cathedrale. (3).I Have No Easy Refuge.

                  1.

          A Poem is....


                       ....a stained glass window


Shards of light deftly cutting
Through thick black lines

That meander over sheets of fierce colour
Their slow lead riverlets of words

Thick lines that sometimes dissolve
In a sunburst

Or spread out into solid pools
Of intense darkness

Ink spilled by a palsied hand.

                   *

Words are my store of colours,

The pictorial music of language
Engraved upon a flat surface

In the silence of my room.

Even the chimes of the studio clock
Are stopped while I am working.

Words are sacred
And must be given space to sound in.

                     *

A stream of sunlight
Filtered through amber glass
Covers my hand

Spreads translucent patterns over sheets of blank paper.

I recollect a frosty Easter Morning,
The burnished pavements inside Chartres Cathedral
Shimmering through a mirage of blue and yellow,
Dreams and reality merging.

A poem is....

                       ------

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 12th. - December 5th. 2014. - February 1st. - 12th. - 13th. 2015.
October 7th. 2015.
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                 2.

 Beauvais Cathedrale



Beauvais Cathedrale,
Broken, but perfect also.

Symbol of the martyred saints,
Fragile, but true to purpose.

A casket of light
In the depths of the city.

Only L`eglise Sainte Jeanne-d`Arc
Shining like a beacon in the market place

Of the inland port of Rouen,

Reveals a delicate, sublime grace
More perfect in it`s constancy.



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 2nd. - 10th. 2015.
Candlemass.

-------------------------------------------------      

      I Have No Easy Refuge.

                     3.

I am a Christian, but I do not hide behind my faith from the vicissitudes of life, the realities presented to humanity by profound scientific research and discovery. I have no easy refuge, no infantile sense of certainty in my personal salvation, only God knows if I am in a state of grace or not. The silences of God can be terrifying, more desolate than the arid world view of simple minded atheism, but they are a part of everyday reality and we must accept them. We must not try to fill the void with false concepts of God based upon our petty human requirements, our limited view of the world and beyond. My duty is to serve, and not to hide behind a simplistic image of God. I believe that Jesus was everything that He said He was, no more no less. I also accept the special calling of the saints, while not agreeing that every person canonized by The Church was indeed a saint. My duty in life is to help people as best I can by bringing a little kindness and understanding into their lives; I am very much a devotee of both Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Catherine of Siena in this regard.

We should love our critics and our enemies as well as our friends, forgive the wrongs with which they burden us us; a hard responsibility but a responsibility that we must take up for the sake of our children and all future generations. I respect other faiths because our minds are far too small to fully understand God and all aspects of reality. Our various vocabularies are not large enough to express one single accurate vision of the world as it really is, nor are they ever likely to become so. It is a gross impertinence to believe in the supreme importance of mankind within the universe, and the imperative for mankind to fully understand the universe, but at the same time every human life is sacred, and to take a life, whether the killing is the result of a private tragedy, an act of war, or an execution sanctioned by a state, is murder. I say this, although among the saints that I specifically venerate I include Saint Joan and the uncannonized Simone Weil, two marvelously spiritual women of genius who became profoundly, momentously involved in hideous wars. They stood up against evil in the only ways that were practical for people possessed of such extraordinary talents in their war torn eras; and that we must always do, whatever our abilities, wherever we are and whatever the consequences. To be brave in the service of love is the only way to be truly alive. And what in fact is evil? I would include any form of racism, not giving equal human rights to all members of society, be they male or female; violence against people who hold opinions different from our own, be they religious or secular; violence against the innocent and vulnerable, especially children and those with disabilities; amassing great wealth at the expense of other people and to the detriment of the environment; any type of slavery; the upholding of unjust laws. I also consider iconoclasts to be evil, those who destroy churches, temples, mosques,and great works of art, just because they represent a different point of view from that of the destroyer.All of these evils are symptoms of a limited vision, an inability to open our hearts and minds to the other. To quote W H Auden, "We must love one another or die". Yes, to be a true, traditional Catholic Christian, Roman or otherwise, there can be no hiding place from the realities of life, our small part in the complex nature of the universe and beyond. God is our strength and refuge, but we are also expected to be honest, humane and brave. The refuge of God is a hard place to inhabit.

My mother, who in late middle age converted to Anglo - Catholicism, initially brought me up to be a sceptic, a free thinker; but when I reached the age of eight she sent me to the local Baptist Chapel on Sunday afternoons. I loathed the place. The preacher bored me to tears. I had already attended both Russian Orthodox and Anglican services, and had been deeply impressed by these experiences, but I was not entirely comfortable with either of these institutions. When I visited a relative in Paris, she would on a Sunday take me either to St. Denis or Rouen Cathedral. I was completely happy with the Latin Mass, and felt that I had been blessed. When I got back home to London however, I was subjected to a barrage of anti Catholic sentiment that left me feeling confused and unable to know  what to believe or who to trust. The upshot of all this was that I took the easy way out and became an agnostic, but not for long; the memory of those Latin Masses quietly shadowed my thinking.

As a young man I was a rebel, fighting hard to establish my place in the world, but at the same time feeling culturally rootless. I was living in England, but I did not feel completely at home there. I have always sensed that my true home is in France, but I have remained in London for most of my life. I forced myself to become more English than I felt. I studied English painters and composers, becoming a fan of Purcell, Vaughn Williams and Tallis; I soon lost the understanding of the French language that as a child had been natural to me. But I have never learned to think like a dyed in the wool Englishman, and for this reason I remain a committed European. Nationalists, such as the followers of UKIP, are anathema to me.

I may have espoused agnosticism in my late teens, but I never stopped searching for a philosophy or a religion that I could personally relate to; love as one loves a close friend. I was not lazy enough to become a non thinking materialist; and although I love science, I have always thought it to be too closely allied to mechanics to be intrinsically moral. Science and higher mathematics are aesthetically pleasing, but it is important that we do not confuse aesthetics with morality, but alas, many people seem to do just that. So I studied Eastern religions in depth, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, thinking, without making strict comparisons,  that they must be more profound than their Western counterparts. I also read the Koran with intense interest; but it was not until I discovered the Cloud of Unknowing, that great book of Christian mysticism, that I began to feel that I was moving onto home ground, a place always at risk of being lost, but somehow kept intact by the intensity of faith. I had no knowledge of the European mystics until I read that book, but once I began to study the mystics,both medieval and modern, I rapidly ceased to be an agnostic and, against my will, slowly, ever so slowly, became a practising Christian.

This period of gradual conversion was a very difficult time in my life. I felt that I was rejecting the clear cut, materialistic, modern civilization that I had been born into for a more complex, almost medieval view of the world.When I was a callow teenager I would join my friends mocking the Christians preaching at Speakers Corner. I found their language far too simplistic to convey any of the truths of the Gospel; because even then I realized that there are great truths expressed in the New Testament texts, but they are truths to struggle with, not to dilute to the brink of meaninglessness in emotionally enunciated sound bites. I already understood that human languages are too limited to express the concept of God, and that it is this lack of a suitable vocabulary that makes atheism such an attractive idea. It is a very easy idea to understand, and therefore does not need to be studied in depth. I had not yet learned that the person of Christ, and the lives of the saints, show us the very face of God. Or that much of God that Human Beings can dare to understand. It is the Glory that needs to be expressed through human nature to be even partially understandable; otherwise it remains distant, out of reach, deeply incomprehensible. The wonders of the universe, the beauty of transcendent art such as the quire of Meaux Cathedral, can only hint at this, but the face of the suffering Christ shows us everything that we need to know. The mystics taught me this, not the preachers in Hyde Park forever shouting "Jesus Saves". It is not my business to presume that I have been saved, but it is my business to be guided by faith and to try and live a righteous life.
     
I am very much of the Catholic tradition, but attached to the Anglican Communion. Within my experience members of the Anglo Catholic tradition tend to be more forward thinking than many a populist Evangelical.Within my experience Anglo Catholics tend to be more intellectual, more introspective,more spiritual, more open to radical ideas than Calvinistic protestants, those somewhat dour descendants of the developers of modern day capitalism.I would say that at this moment in my life my beliefs are finely balanced between those of the Anglo Catholic and the Roman Catholic denominations. Both these communions, (there is only one universal church after all, a fact we should never forget), allow me to ask questions. If I cannot ask questions I cannot be fully mindful of God. The only problem that I have with the Roman Catholic Church is that I fully endorse women priests and bishops, a point of view that the Vatican is unlikely to accept for a very long time. Many years ago I was received into the Roman Catholic Church, but because that Church will not ordain women, I have had to become, a not entirely uncritical, member of the Anglican Family, a situation that has given me great heart ache. The refuge of God is a hard place to inhabit.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 6th. - 8th. - 10th. 2015.      

(1) Her Timed Entrance. A Love Poem. (2) The Silence of Nam June Paik.

                    1

Her Timed Entrance. A Love Poem. 

Quietly through the labyrinth of time
You followed the clues I had scattered;
Your footsteps, although muffled,
Discerned at ten years distance,
Their soft sure tread
Praised from the first.
Your gently whispered words,
A far away enchantment;
Your elfin face, a shadow in my mirror.

And now you have arrived
To the minute,
On the very day expected
At the meeting of two paths.

Give me your hand,
There is no reason to be afraid.
Empathy has long since been our guide;

Give me your hand, your nerve is strong,
My sense of purpose certain;
Let us finish this journey together.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 23rd. 1966. - January 29th. - 31st.- February 1st. 2015.
April 17th. - July 23rd. 2015.

I have reverted to the original last line sketched in 1966.

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                            2.

  The Silence of Nam June Paik.


Broken records

The voice of an era lying smashed
On the floor

Discarded

Now everything that you said to me
Is merely dust for the hoover

Words of false regret
Little broken lies

Poems locked for seven years
Inside a Highgate sepulchre

Little scraps of black
To be dropped into the bin

Broken songs of innocence
Picked over by blunt strangers

The municipal body snatchers

Broken records
Scattered on the floor

Unregarded

Depersonalized

The last of your love letters
Hammered into splinters
Rebuke forgetfulness


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 6th. - 7th. 2014. - January 30th. 2015.
First sketched during a visit to the Tate.

Oradour sur Glane, The Martyred Town. (Revised Version).

The burnt out buildings and vehicles
Of Oradour sur Glane
Have rotted on the rich green sward
Of Haute - Vienne
Like an unhealed wound
For much of my lifetime.
These piteous relics of a long gone epoch
Are a constant reminder of the horrors of conflict,
More powerful than any thick grained photograph
Placed high on a shelf
By a grieving parent.

Flickering images of starving prisoners
Violently gripping barbed wire fences
As they stare out at freedom
Lose potency as the years pass by,
But these shattered walls and caved in roofs
Are defiantly Now, and forever with us.

Nearly all of the townsfolk were butchered here,
Crammed into barns like pigs for slaughter,
Burnt alive in the ancient church,
Or shot as they tried to evade the squads
Of fanatical Third Reich soldiers.
These stones, these rusting hulks of cars,
These bombed out shells of well loved houses,
Are like scarred megaliths signalling anger
Against an uncomprehending world.

These are the only monuments that make any sense here;
Words are too fragile to describe such crimes,
And photographs are simply a blur of shadows
Dissolving gradually into nothing.
These ruins are raw, jagged and hard,
If we get too close we can tear our skin on them,
Rip our civilized flesh to the bone.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 22nd. 2015.  

I was too deeply affected to write about the recent events in Paris, my second city, but when a friend put a picture of the burnt out rusting cars left over from the 1944 massacre at Oradour sur Glane onto Facebook I just had to respond with a poem. I hope it speaks for all victims of atrocities, whoever they are, whatever part of the world they live in.  

A Beach in Donegal, 27th. December 2014.

A washed out
Faded
Frost blue
Clarity of sky
Hurts the eyes

I study
Tall clouds
Sailing
Serenely
Far above scree grey Errigal
Like the fleece white rudderless bucking ships
Of Celtic saints
Returning from America

Other mountains shall burst the soft hulls open
Upon inland peaks
And cornices
To steal their cargoes -
The priceless gifts -
But just as quickly lose them

This coast is usually mild
Unlike green hedged Fermanagh
Soaked in fog and snow -
A distant whisper of breaking waves
Reminds me of my origins
On the western verge of Europe -
Here where every rock and stone is sacred
And sea birds cackle archaic hymns
To strange primeval gods

The wet sand reflects the sailing clouds
In a harsh white natural mirror
Dazzling in the low December sun -
I stand
Half blind
In the midst of this sea edged mirror
Not knowing if I am placed on solid ground
Or somehow locked in stasis
Between the earth and sky

A nostalgia for sacred places pulled me home
Much as the west wind drove the ships of the saints
Travelling east from Greenland -
The holds crammed tight with legends

But I cannot honour the memory of those saints
As I linger here close by the ocean edge
Muttering paternosters
More out of habit than any sense of wonder

The cries of the grey winged birds drown out my every word
Mocking me into silence

Their magic rules the air


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 27th. 2014 - January 13th. - 14th. 2015. 

Will Shakespeare. (Revised).

Shakespeare, I meet you at nights in the pub,
The brothel, the goal.
You are one of our number,
A rogue and vagabond, a whore monger,
Dirt under your finger nails, spittle in your beard,
Cocking a snoop at the guardians of morality
As you write fierce plays to the thrum of the clock
In a smoke black alehouse.

Rapier sharp with raw sexual fury
Your words daub the tenements with a visceral anger
More relevant than untutored graffiti,
To tell us exactly how the wide world wags.
Thou art the truth speaker without parallel,
No public health warning can devitalize you.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 16th. - 22nd. - 23rd. 2014.
Re - written January 7th. 2015.

(1).Christmas Eve - Fermanagh. First Version. (2). O Zone.

                      1.

Christmas Eve - Fermanagh. (First Version).



There are no bright colours here -
The sky - pale as a shroud
Wet from weeping -
The sun - a dim white eye
Half closed among vast clouds.

The bone thin winter trees
Reach up like gnarled hands
Pleading -
Old saints at prayer
With few hopes of salvation. -
A blank horizon pressing down
Onto the ancient landscape -
Unremittingly -
Mocks this fragile sadness -
The pale sun fading
As a thin moon rises.

Cruel escarpments -
Mist sodden mountain walls
Melt like unquiet ghosts. -
Christmas Eve - Fermanagh -
The stillness gathers all unto itself
As evening settles. -
Clouds spread wide like canvas sails
That once drove famine ships.

Awaiting their congregations
The grey stone village churches
Stand like border forts -
The symbols of partition. -
The shadows of ancient grief -
Of martyrdoms and oppression -
Deeply stain their walls.

I was not born here -
But I might as well have been. -
I am at home in a frontier landscape
Where nothing is ever certain.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 24th. - 25th. - 30th. - 31st. 2014.
Last four lines, January 2nd. 2015.
Belcoo and Enniskillen. For Eithne. 

-------------------------------------------------------

                      2.

                O Zone.


The river of love bore you
Laughing
To an early death

May La tour Eiffel never cease
Weeping
Nor your gold winged Christ hit the ground

Happy New Year
Dear Angel
Guillaume Apollinaire


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 24th. - December 31st. 2014.

(1) The face of the Virgin. (2) Ghosting. (A Song). (3) A Shared Nightmare.

                      1.

      The face of the Virgin


Your face - pale in the church window -
Pensive among gold angel wings
Spread to shield the derelict stable
From the stiletto thrust of desert winds
Cutting through the cold back streets
Of war stormed Bethlehem.

Your face - neither Arab nor Israeli -
But North Italian - if my guide book is right -
Portrays to perfection the love of Mother Mary
For her boy child - born that violent night -
The shrieks of racists echoing through the city -
The flames of rockets arcing through the sky.

Your face - pale with love that defeats ideology
Shimmering among shadows in a patch of light.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
16th. December 2014.
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                        2.

         Ghosting. (A Song).


over our footsteps
criss-crossing the snow
your shadow drifting
obliterates mine -
black upon blackness -
we fold over the whiteness
a singular darkness

i loved you once -
but your love was unkind -
and now you have left me
dumb and blind
to wander at nights beside you

your hand on my shoulder
you whispering softly -
I turn to hear you
against the storm -
but your voice cannot magic
a path through the white wind
that shatters all calmness

i loved you once -
but your love was unkind -
and now you have left me
dumb and blind
to wander at nights beside you

over our footprints
criss-crossing the snow
your shadow drifting
with infinite deftness
interacts with mine -
two shadows ghosting
in the raw white wind

i loved you once -
but your love was unkind -
and now you have left me
dumb and blind
to wander at nights beside you


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
First Sketched November 5th. 1978.
Revised November 3rd. 2010 - December 17th. - 18th. 2014.
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                           3.

         A Shared Nightmare.
      


Through a glass darkly I dream you
Dream hopes I must forsake

Flecked by sombre shadows
The mist dissolves the lake

I fear that we are drowning
and yet we dare not wake

I reach out to find the mirror
To touch but not to take

Your voice cries out forlornly
Cries out across the lake

Our hands meet in the darkness
A cold dawn starts to break

Your fingers melt like icicles
Melt back into the lake

Through a glass darkly I dream you


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 7th. 1980. - March 14th. 2014.
August 2nd. 2014. - December 18th. 2014.