Four Poems for JP. Revised. (1). Easter 1966. (2) The Biography of a Real Love. (3) Sunflowers. (4). A Love Remembered.

                       1.

               Easter 1966.


Girl
I remember the warmth of your love in a cold house;
The April wind rattling the sash windows;
The street dogs yelping.

We seldom linked our fingers, cuddled or kissed;
For hours we lay side by side co-writing ballads,
Their words long since forgotten.

One night we wove two wedding rings from strands of cotton;
But the plaintive wail of the passing trains
Told of unplanned journeys.

Twice we consulted the cards, measured our lifelines,
Your fate seemed tied to the north,
Mine to the south, in Southwark, by the somnambulant flow of the river.


Girl
This poem is an intimate letter
Encrypted into the night
On the keyboard of my computer.

The clock that you bought me is ticking
Like the fault in the groove of a record
Played hour after hour without stopping.

I have not, for one moment, ceased pining,
And time does not value compassion.
Please send a few words tomorrow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 11th. 12th. - October 7th. - 8th. 2014.
April 6th. - 7th. - July 22nd.- 24th. - August 10th. - December 20th. 2015.
April 2nd. 2016.

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                         2.

The Biography of a Real Love.


We needed help that night,
The two old ladies taught you not to be afraid,
Not to turn tail and run;
Guiding you gently from the edge of panic
Into a quiet acceptance,
A peacefulness no child could ever know.

And eventually you proved to be the brave one,
Taking charge of the awkward situation,
In fact, being quite bossy as you held me to account,
Forcing me to accept the validity of our love.

Of course you were the more vulnerable of us two,
The more likely to suffer hurt, to be left holding the baby.
It is always hard to be a forthright girl
In love with a guy who is rarely in town when wanted.

You have been remarkably loyal over the decades,
Although we have never lived under the same roof
For more than a day or two;
You working all hours at the theatre, me simply filling in time.

Perhaps, now that we are much older
We should stop being quite so foolish;

We could stack all our goods in one pile
And settle back down together.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 11th. - July 15th. 2015.

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                          3.

                  Sunflowers.


After we had made love for the first time
The old gypsy women wrapped you in a thick blanquet
To keep you warm, there being no fire in the room
And heat thought of as necessary
To guarantee conception.

I was barred from hugging you close until the morning
And lay quite still at the edge of the bed sobbing
While you slept soundly, snug in your nest of wool,
A safe calm world
Sacred to you alone.

For the rest of that year we scarcely saw each other,
And then one morning came a call from the hospital
That sent me dashing out into the rain.
Your smile was radiant as a garden packed with sunflowers
When you spied me nervously enter the ward.

Holding our new born child while a nurse taught you to breast feed,
Arms made strong by love, eyes half blind with tears,
Helped me to blank from my mind those long cold weeks
When I wandered, always alone, through late night streets,
Calling out your name.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 29th. - 30th. - 31st. 2014.
Revised, July 20th. December 20th. 2015.

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                           4. 

A Love Remembered, Forty Years On.


Girl
Slim as a Weeping Willow;
Hair unkempt, an ebony river
Flowing over frost white shoulders;
Eyes intense with sorrow.

The years stacked up, one on another,
Collated memoirs neatly catalogued
But rarely read, their contents censored,
The illustrations half rubbed out.

Shortly after our child was born
You shipped back home to misty Ulster,
Retreating from your life in London.

You mentioned only a short vacation,
But the evening that you boarded ship
A door slammed shut against the future
That we had quietly planned together,
Slammed shut with cruel finality.

I now know that our parents thought us
Too young to wed, to raise a family;
Too young to cut loose from the high life:
And so they packed you back home quickly,
A convict strictly monitored.

                              One weekday, while your parents were out working.
                              You stayed at home and tried to cut your wrists,
                              The baby fast asleep inside the cot.
                              With luck,your mother came home one hour early,
                              And she somehow found a way to save you
                              With cubes of ice and a tourniquet.
                              All this I learned some forty years too late,
                              A cryptic message from a perfect stranger.

Girl
These days I often visit Belfast City,
A restless town packed with fears and dreams;
The ghost filled shipyards; crudely stencilled Peace Lines;
The cloud smudged vistas of the sombre Lough.
At dawn I have too often been awoken
By a violent squall of mad sectarian seagulls
Swarming over oil encrusted shallows
their grey infighting flock;
                                   The shriek of sirens;
The departure of the ferries from the dock.

None of these scenes are foreign to me now,
But sometimes when I wander out alone
Through the glass and concrete city centre
I think that I can hear your light heeled footsteps
Tapping close behind me in the crowd;
The sharp edged music of your northern laughter
Skirling a ragged echo on the wind.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 6th. - 10th. 2014.
July 30th. - 31st. 2015. 
August 18th. - December 20th.  2015.

Harlequin and Companion 1901. (A response to an early painting by Picasso).

Before the age of neon, Parisian nights
Were an unfocused blur of shade and colour.

Outside the circus even the well lit bars seemed small and shadowy,
The features of the drinkers unclear, observed through smoked glass and absinthe;
But under the Big Top clarity enters the scene,
The loneliness behind the wildest laughter
Exposed in the curve of a lip.

The eyes wide open, soulful, dark and feral,
The shoulders bunched up tightly, old sacks packed with pain;
The fingers claw like, shaping violent gestures,
Stretched out like the legs of a lace webbed spider
Poised for an easy kill.
They seem ready to scratch the face of the Harlequin,
To draw fresh blood from behind the thin white mask.

It was the sadness of clowns that caught Pablo`s attention,
Impelled him to paint these sad, pale elegant faces,
Defined by black outlines, stark webs of fierce unfreedom
That impose isolation,
Delineate a persona.
The ennui expressed by two languid performers
Revealed in an icon of hopelessness.



Picasso,
Your portraits of the poor, reproduced in books, on postcards,
Have long since been a part of everyday existence,
Encrypted in our minds, engraved upon our hearts.
But are we mere admirers of their technical assurance?
                      
Tonight the city dazzles me, just like a hi tec fairground,
Boulevards packed with young folk, denim clad and larking;
A spun web of brilliant light dispersing every shadow.
But located just a step away, in stairwells and in cellars,
The homeless lie down in the dark, unwanted, out of sight.
Their wide eyes fiercely vigilant. Their faces, thin white masks.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 29th. - 30th. - June 1st. - 4th. - July 10th. - 13th. - 14th. - 15th. - 21st. - 26th. 2015.
February 5th. 2017. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Harlequin and Companion 1901. Version Two.


Two clowns sharing a lunchtime Pernod.

Nothing to eat.

Nothing to say.

Life goes on as usual.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 4th. 2015.

World. ( For Emily Bronte ).

The hawk returns to my hand when I call
And accepts the hood as I slip it over her head
Having no notion of the hangman`s knot,
Nor fear of my intentions.
She has been hunting above the long stone wall
While I stand here on the rocky uplands
Watching the wind shake the autumn grasses.

In late October the moor is cold and haunted,
The voice of Gaia seems to resonate
In a rough primordial language
Through the fissures in the rugged landscape.
Her words lack form or meaning,
But I know that she is mourning
For the pains her children give her.
The savage wounds.
The near annihilation.

There are sinkholes hereabouts
Created by the miners
Shifting tons of coal.
They have torn the depths to threads,
Polluted streams with acid,
Cut deep into the heart of Mother Earth.
I live her fearful anguish. I know it for my own,
My strength, like hers, is waning.
I sometimes feel as fragile as a moth
I once retrieved from the glowing embers
But accidentally crushed between my fingers.

I should not have lingered on this rugged outcrop
To watch the orange sky shade into black
As the sun dipped out of sight.
The tethered hawk fiercely grips my taut wrist.
Her lungs are aching. Her hooded eyes are sore.
Her tongue curled hard and dry.
A raw fog tainted with the stench of diesel
Is seeping slowly through the evening air,
Blotting out a billion wondrous stars.
I long to let my hawk go, take her flight to freedom,
But we are long term prisoners to man`s folly,
Trapped on a crippled planet, and cannot now escape.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
19th. - 24th. October 2014.
30th. June. - 6th. - 7th. - 21st. July 2015.

An Early Morning Walk, 5 am. June 3rd. 2013. (Revised).

This morning I watched the sunrise,
A pearl in an indigo sea
Denuded of ships,
The far off clouds
Pale as distant mountains.

A solitary wren sang in a hedgerow,
My only companion
In this deserted street;
Perhaps a lonely wanderer
Pining for a lost soul mate?

Hands clenched against the cold
I walked to the local cash point,
That emblem of insecurities
More feared than an unhooked phone.

My fiancee has made me poor,
Emptied the Bank forever.
I looked up at the new found pearl,
Bright as an Irish Love ring,
And wondered how soon it would burn
A great hole in my pocket.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 4th. 2013. - July 3rd. - 4th. 2015.

A rewrite of the poem Early Morning Walk.
blogged in June 2013.

Short Poem About Bees. (Revised).

I keep a nest of bees under my bonnet,
Where they reside, restricted and yet free,
Safe as houses, long miles from fields of wheat
Soaked in pesticides, unsafe for busy bees.

Thus I have earned a tasty hoard of honey,
Private to myself, but sometimes shared with friends
Who need a fillip to lighten up their lives
While all around the trees are losing leaf,
And flowers are shrinking back into the earth
Having ceased to bloom and flourish.

Meanwhile my bees are safe and buzzing fiercely,
But once my hat is off    the puckish breezes lift them
Up and away into the fields of wheat, where
Sickness clamps their wings, and soon they shall be dying.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
2nd. - 6th. July 2015. 

Two Poems. (1) Dragon Princess. (2) Recalling an Old Poet. (Revised).

                1.

   Dragon Princess.


When I was a child you mother said,
"Touch my belly and feel the baby inside me".

Now we are fully grown
I watch you flirting with crowds of men,
Lifting your skirt and laughing.

My eye on the clock, & disguising my pain
As if time had never happened,
I recall that morning in the park,
Your mother carefully guiding my hand,
Her belly fat as a pumpkin.

Now I watch you provoke this drunken crowd
With a raucous display of twerking,
And I remember the sparks in your mother`s eyes
When I stepped back amazed at you moving inside her,
And I wonder which leg kicked me.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 3rd. 1984. - June 30th. - July 1st. 2015. 

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                  2.

Recalling an Old Poet.                      


Sorry Buddha
I can`t sit on the floor all day
Waiting for the penny to drop,      
I am an artist and a writer,
A dancer and an actor,
It is by hard graft and creativity
That I reach for truth
And sometimes glimpse Satori.

There was a poet I knew when young,
A soldier, a lover,
An ex pugilist, & never far from a barney.
He was my prototype, my hero,
My light on the future,
Writing scripts & poems until his mind gave out
At the age of eighty
And words became a babble.

He was a vendor of news and gossip,
A grizzled old beachcomber,
Notebook in pocket,
Some girl always in tow.
He trawled the sands for scraps of local knowledge,
Arcane or in yer face,
Ancient or brand new.
In his wise mind
Reality was apocalyptic,
Enlightenment an ecstatic love tryst
Carolled by loud cicadas
Under a burgeoning moon.

Buddha don`t tie me down,
Don`t bore me rigid,
Sat under the Bodhi tree
Waiting for something to happen
Day after day after day;
The poet has taught me to question,
and never to trust the answer
However concise and erudite.
His example I will cherish
In every word and careful action
Until the ink dries on the paper,
The last syllable trips and falls.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 27th. - 28th. - 29th. - 30th. - July 9th.  2015.

Notes.
Waiting for the penny to drop... = waiting to realize the truth.
a barney... = a fight / trouble.

Rapunzel, A Folk Tale for Grown Ups.

You crouch alone in deep monastic shadow
Combing your thick blonde hair hour by hour
With a kind of wild obsession,
Much like a child addicted to self harming.

Both pain and joy are equal in our living,
And it is true that separation nearly killed us
When we were prised apart.
But self pity and despair must not deceive us.

That ivory tower in which you long have lived
Can only give an incomplete protection
Against hard blows from day to day existence,
Sacrifices we incur to stay alive.

Propriety decreed you should remain in ignorance
Of wars and poverty, the profit margins of your kind;
Your heroic dishonesty was meant to stay inviolate
To impress the highest bidder.

It was a secret that one time I was your lover,
And to shut me out your aunt designed a tower
In which you sit and grieve. It was a secret that
This witch would bed you nightly after supper,

Then kick you back to your room with the dawn.
And now you crouch alone beside the  mirror
Combing your golden locks hour after hour;
Songs of heart break shivering on your lips.

But if you accept a less self conscious world view,
My reluctance to play the great romantic hero
Will not seem quite so strange. I will scale the granite walls
Up to your chamber, but not with ropes of hair

I have more sense, and will not risk my neck
even for you. But now it seems this tower is merely virtual
And can be turned off with a simple switch. This I will do
Provided you will grant me one small favour,

That is to marry me as once you promised,
Before you fled back to your childhood dreams
And became entrapped inside a lonely castle
Built by a maiden aunt, who was, I think, a fable.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 21st. - 22nd. - 23rd. - 25th. - July 7th. 2015.