The Migrant. (A Lost Soul in Modern Britain).

I am a migrant.
I come from a foreign place,
A maligned country
Once renowned for fairness and equality,
For intellectual tolerance
And racial harmony,
But now torn apart by factions,
By greedy warlords,
By smart suit racists,
By ignorant fundamentalists,
By rich fools bating the poor.
These are the individuals I now write to.

I am a migrant,
An unwilling frightened traveller
Forever on the move
With nothing in my back pack,
Pockets torn and empty,
Fighting to cross frontiers,
The fiercely guarded barriers
Of self interest and inhumanity,
Of terror and self doubt.

I am a migrant,
But I do not come from Syria,
From Afghanistan,
From Africa,
The once civilised Palmyra.
I have not changed my dwelling
For more that forty years,
I have not been kicked into the highway
Covered in blood and tears.

You cannot handcuff me and fly me home,
Efficiently deport me,
Shove me on a wagon and transport me,
Lock me in a Death Camp,
Cut me down at dawn.
I am a refugee from the time when I was born,
April 27th. 1943,
My place of birth, London,
Then at war with tyranny.

But it seems that you can casually ignore me,
Deride my "Love thy neighbour" eccentricity,
Cut access to free knowledge,
Deny my right to speak.
You can, it seems, defile my old ideals;
Smash up my hope, the humane Welfare State,
Maroon me on the narrow beach of history,
And leave me there to drown.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 3rd. - 4th. 2015.

Grief.

Now that you are dead
The dawn is a blank curtain
Pulled across the sun
To hide the light.

Your voice on the chrome cassette,
A mono echo of time past
Relayed through a single speaker
In the corner of my room.

My hand that held your hand
Now only grasps the air
That once you breathed:
The air you filled with song
When I first spoke your name.

Paper flowers in the vase
Have turned as grey as ash,
Grey as your brittle bones
Now buried in the earth.

And yet our yesterday
Is as clear and bright as spring
In the confines of my mind,
The jewel box of my memory.

But the contents are just a mirage
Flashed on a silver screen;
They remain as insubstantial
As your sweet recorded voice.

I do not long for death,
But without you life seems empty,
A shadow of the clear bright days
That once we knew.

I do not long for death,
But I need a private sanctuary
Where I can learn to make my peace
With this dark remorseless pain.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 30th. - 31st. 2015.
September 8th. 2015.

(1) A Tragic Event, Belsize Park 1985. (2) Four Short Poems. (3). September Poem. (Revised Version).

                 1.

       A Tragic Event.



On the ground - the boots.
Next to them - the body.
My first ever real life corpse
Lying there
In the dusk,
Still as a stone.

Something to note in the diary.
Something to snap on the phone.
A notable event,
A once in a lifetime story
To startle jaundiced eyes.
An accident,
A suicide,
A murder.
A dark chapter suddenly opened.
A nasty surprise.

The man had fallen
From the adjacent building
Without due notice,
Without due warning,
That sultry evening.
With luck the neighbours were all inside
Bewitched by the spell of the 6 o`clock News;
History should happen elsewhere,
Not by the communal stair.

The building was now strangely silent
An hour or so after the event,
The corpse left alone,
Covered by a scarlet blanket,
To keep it private, unscary
while awaiting the Constabulary. -
Absent the crying children,
Absent the squabbling parents,
Absent the loud radios
That have revved up my tinnitus
Each time that I walked this way.
Today - just this unearthly stillness
As if the whole world had paused -
Had stopped breathing.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 23rd. - 24th. - 26th. 2015.  

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

                     2.

       Four Short Poems.


            The Hermit.


Born Underground.
Bombs falling.
Death will be no stranger.
           

            Love Poem.


You came to me in the hot night
Dressed in a kaftan of purest silk,
A glass of water in your hand.


              Postscript.


White paper,
Black lines criss crossing,
Leading nowhere.


             Celebration.


The fireworks were surely for us,
The Last Night Party irrelevant;
Your smile broke all the windows.


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

The little poem Celebration is dedicated to my dear friend Cilla who died on August 1st. We had known each other since our early teens. She is so much missed.
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              3.

 September Poem.


                           She loved me
                                                  and in September
She wore the curling leaves in her hair
                           As we walked by
                                                  the mist hued waters
Where geese with clipped wings dipped their beaks for bread

                           and later
                                                  in the park she held me
while the red moon rose while buzzed the night crazed gnats
                           and great boughs
                                                  dropped noon ripe apples
Into our waiting palms


                           Then quietly
                                                Hands clasped
                                                                         we drifted
                   Towards the dying embers of the sun
                           Out through white gates
                                     into a city
        Where hi tech threads of neon lights were spun
                               into a flimsy tent
                     Out dazzling the faded stars
                                Until autumnal
                                         mist
Dissolved all sense of wonder - and proved our love talk
dumb

And then you smiled                More loving than at night
And spilled a sudden clarity       Into the cold dawn light


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 7th. 1965.
Final two lines, September 23rd. 1983.
Revised October 12th. 2012. - August 29th. - September 9th. 2015.

The Funeral, 20th. August 2015.

It was the smallness of the coffin that shocked me.
Could a whole life be locked away in that tight box
As if it had never happened?
The laughter - the wit - the frankness - the comments that could shatter glass? -
The sweetness - the kindness - the big fierce voice?
This was a whole world, a mini solar system, a multiplex of universes,
It was not something miniscule, irrelevant,
It was truly culture shifting.
Could all this be lost in an instant,
Dropped into the silent darkness,
Switched off ?
(The memories that should last
Confined to the fading minds
Of old and vulnerable people?)

What can I now say in public
About the girl I first met in the market,
That cold wet Liverpool morning?
(You managed to haggle the last half pence
Out of my schoolboy pocket).
And years later, in sunless Goodge Street,
Laughing like raucous street kids
We swingled a paint box of rainbows,
The punters too drunk to join in.
Then glitzed up at The Savoy,
(Just a trillion miles out of the Cavern),
You singing your Scouser heart out,
Me somewhere at the edge of the audience,
But not quite lost in the crowd.

Well yes, I suppose that is how it was all meant to be
Once the long old road had been travelled,
(The last interview tape unravelled,
The final song packed in the can).
But somehow it just seems so unfair
That your life could be crushed in an instant
In the glare of a Spanish heatwave,
The sunlight so bright on your face.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 20th. - 22nd. - 23rd. 2015.

For Cilla.

(1) Afterwards. (Revised).

After our tender love making - only the memory - the stark emptiness.

You light a cigarette.
The Lighter flames an arc that for a moment seems to link us,
Pull us back together.
This is an illusion,
A deep loneliness remains.

Our hands reach out to heal the broken closeness,
To kill this intimate pain,
The ice blade to the heart;
To regain, through touch, the depths our minds cannot reach.-
We seem to abandon coherent language,
The basic tool kit of community
That had kept us close
so far.
Kept us thinking we were truly friends,
and that we understood each other.

The grey smoke drifts and curls between us,
A shadow shifting in and out of focus.
Your eyes interrogate the sullen distance.

Perhaps you were looking passed me all along;
Sex can create a distance between lovers,
Especially when love is new,
Not tried - not proven - not fully understood.-
You fetch my case, my coat, my shoes;
Our first full night spent at ease together
Cut short by bitterness,

Talking - and yet - not talking -
We kiss goodnight, unnerved, just like two strangers,
Then part to consummate our private griefs.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 19th. - 20th. 2015. 
December 4th. 2015.

(1) A Midsummer Night`s Dream. (2) Painting.

Sorrowful Titania
Lost in the torpor of an immense dark forest
At the hottest hour of summer;
Sleeping fitfully;
Waiting for the cool nights of yellow gowned September
To prise apart her eyelids
With the scintillating strobe blades of Autumn moonlight
Dancing through the stare
Of her ever watchful lover.

And the girl said to me. Nothing.
Walking out from the dark cold theatre
into the driving rain, back to her room,
Four white walls and a simple writing desk.

Well, you did return to me the Indian Changeling
Dressed in a coat of pearls, and riding on a desert camel,
But that is no reason to go all moony eyed
Over that woozy Ass of an Athenian
Who could not even ee aw for his supper.
Next time you think it expedient to be unfaithful
Please choose a better Actor,
Not a horny handed would be Matinee idol.

Well. All`s well that ends well,
and the sweet letter that you wrote to me
From the privacy of your white walled bedroom
Has brought some peace of mind.
But in future when I think of you, Titania,
It will be without the olde world illusions
I spun about your spotlight sculpted face.
The unspoiled ingenue sat in the dark wood
Watching the wild Thyme grow.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
14th. August 2015.   

The Selkie. (Revised & corrected Version).

You did not rescue me.
You stole my life.
You stole my mind.
You stole my skin.
You stripped me to the bone,
The veins and sinews,
The small scraped skull.
You tried to break me,
Tried to remake me
Into a gilded image,
Into your private icon,
A reflection of your self.

But this evening while you slept,
And our children lay a dreaming
In the quietness of your chamber,
In the darkness of your house,
I found my skin,
I found my stolen self,
I found my long lost life,
Tied up in a battered bundle,
Tied with a yard of string.

And secretly I wore my skin again,
Disfigured as it was,
So torn and broken,
So scratched and red with sores,
So dry and rotten,
Corrupt with scabs and spores.
I wore my proper skin for just one hour,
But found that it still fitted,
Clung tight to flesh and bone,
To nerve and muscle,
My ain true self,
My home.

And tomorrow I shall wear my life once more,
And hearkening to the thunder of the waves,
Their chill and salty cleanness,
Run to the seal grey shore,
The tumult of the ocean.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 10th. 2015.

Based on the Orcadian legend of the fisherman and the Selkie wife.
He stole her seal skin so that she would remain on shore with him,
but she found it,and hating his dishonesty, which is a kind of cruelty,
put it back on and returned to the sea from which she had first come.