Armistice Sunday Pilgrimage, 2015.

The trees are dropping old disguises
Exposing naked veins and taut arteries
That climb November air to scratch the clouds
With delicate dancing,
Deft etching of ephemeral patterns
In the foggy atmosphere.

The blackened roots absorbing brackish water
Snake deeply into earth gnarled tentacles
That burrow deeper than blind moles,
Or fierce artillery shells.
The discarded fancy dress of summer leaves
Lie in heaps upon the path
Awaiting the broom, the black sack and the fire.

We do not honour winter, nor do we desire
Frost scintillated nights with smoke stung air
Scouring cold lungs, scourging red raw eyes.
This sombre month of mourning has its place
Among the fallen poppies; the broken dreams
Of all our yester-years.

This is the month for planning, for planting deep
The scraggy saplings, the spiky climbing roses
That could one day shape arches over the path
To shade the wicket gate.
Under this shade I might pause to hear the song
Of a single nightingale,

                                       A lone bird winging
High above where howitzers once roared
And set tall woods ablaze.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 8th. - 9th. - 10th. 2015.

Three Poems. (1) Dangerous knowledge. (2) Zen Love. (3) Grace Notes.

                 1.

Dangerous Knowledge.



My friend has posted me a virus.

It is very dangerous
and could perhaps kill.

It is a poem.
Short and vibrant.
Just a line or two.

Maybe it will infect the whole echo system,
Bouncing off ideas along the way
As it infests ancient mindsets,
Destroys cultures,
Evolving infestations in every nook and cranny.

This poem is a love poem.
It is about boy meeting girl.

No guns are mentioned.
Bombs.
No hate filled propaganda.
It is about one small event one quiet Friday
Behind the locked doors of a burnt out library.

This poem must be cut down in its tracks.
Shot like a rabid dog.
Shunted to the morgue.
We just cant have a poet who spins a story
About the real life making of a baby
Cavorting his cantos all over the internet.
Such candour just wont do.

Thus another virus flops.
One more germ is pasteurized.
The latest plague put to flight

Before it shuts down all the valid systems,
Crosses all the wires

Leaving just one amber light.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 5th. - 6th. - 8th. 2015.

Written in response to Facebook not allowing me to read my friends innocent poems.
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                 2.

           Zen Love.


Before the pen touches the paper
The poem is written.

Before the clock strikes the hour
The hour has passed.

Before I met you for the first time
We had loved.

Before the moment you were born
We knew each other.

Your face observed behind smoked glass.

Your voice a distant murmur.

Before you kissed me in the park
Your shadow veiled the sunlit path.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
November 2nd. - 4th. 2015.
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                      3.

             Grace Notes.        (A Meditation).


I was not aware that night how you dance,
sway like a reed restless in the wind,
sway to the rhythm of my heart.



Perhaps my heart skipped the occasional beat.

Perhaps my heart was not as steadfast as yours.

Perhaps my heart resonates to the thrum of the wind.



I was not aware that night how you dance
although we stepped lightly from sunset to dawn,

I was only aware of your face pressed to mine,

the pulse of your breath on my cheek.



Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 4th. - 5th. 2015.
December 12th. 2015.

Halloween London 1969 - 2015. (New Vesion).

Sitting in the window seat
Reading Anne Sexton
London far below me

Pre online hegemony
Frost bright and bustling
Whole neighbourhoods one family

Kids itching to throw bangers
Dogs barking in a doorway
Trick or Treat unheard of.

This culture now dismantled,
Outmaneuvered by the wealthy
Fabricating Paradiso.

This town where folk once chattered
On buses,                   On the subway,
          (Not blindly into smart phones,
           Their toddler sized computers,
           But blithely face to face),
Now pimped in paint for tourists,
          (Who never speak to strangers),
Now buried deep as Pompeii

Or dwarfed by plate glass canyons,
The pomp of sky blue citadels
Devised to harvest money.
Trick or Treat writ large.

I sit here in the window seat
And dream of my lost city
That housed both rich and poor.
A town where folk said "pardon me"
When hustling through the markets
Pre keep in touch technology,

Not "OUT MY WAY"            Not "Sorry"


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 31st. - November 1st. 2015.

A Song for Winter.

Sleep garden sleep
Under your duvet of leaves,
Winter is a short season,
Wink twice and it is done.

In February the snowdrops
Welcome the frost white sun.

Sleep garden sleep
Under your duvet of leaves,
Dreams only last a short while,
They drift like smoke on the wind.

February is the lunar month,
No sooner born than gone.

Sleep garden sleep
Under your duvet of leaves.
The shortest day flicks by in a trice,
A glimmer of light through a blind.

December and old January
Plod by in one single night.

Winter dreams are flickering shadows
That deliquesce in February light.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 29th. 2015.

Parliament Hill Fields Revisited. (New Ending).

Those kids you wrote about had hardly noticed you.
You were just a woman standing on a hill
Notebook in hand,
Perhaps a shopping list or the day to day accounts.

You seemed so much like any other adult,
Peering deep into your thoughts, your face a blank,
And distinctly unconnected with the moment
They completely occupied.

This stillness did not stop them in their tracks,
In fact it made no mark at all, no simple glyph;
You were just part of the landscape that they owned,
An object to ignore, to quickly shuffle passed
Or brusquely nudge aside.

Your history was far from simple, far from dull.
A mother snatching an hour of peace and quiet
To observe the post war city, the battered human hive
Of bombed out streets and terraces, of skeletal building sites,
Spread wide in skeins of mist below the park.

But it was not the view that occupied your thoughts,
The embryo of a poem, conceived from signs and soundbites,
Was forming street wise stories in your head;
Stories that spoke of children, alive and dead.

Those school girls in the park have grown quite old now,
And your poem has been fifty years in print.
I suspect that few recall that classroom outing,
It was just another field trip after all;
A lesson out of doors.

And you, my friend, a silent windblown presence
Mourning a stillborn child you seldom name,
Watched, through glacial grief, these restless infants
Swarming down Kite Hill, under the eye of teacher,
Her tongue a clamour of stings.

Soon they were out of sight, their voices lost
Deep in the thrum of traffic, the clatter of trains.
Losing the light, you check your notes, add changes,
Scribble remarks. The poem will be simpler now,
Those fractious children have redeemed the height
On which you stand and grieve.
Thinking on this, you start the short walk home.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
12th. - 20th. May. - 26th. 27th. October 2015.
Final part rewritten, January 26th. - 27th. 2018. 
This poem is about the ordinary and the extraordinary relating on a day to day level. 

(1). Pomegranate. (2) A Couple of Dark Quips..

                 1.


       Pomegranate.



I split the pomegranate in two,
and then the blood of the angels touched my lips
with a taste both sweet and bitter,
so like your greeting kiss
when we meet.

Never for more than an hour or two
can you settle
in the old rocking chair in my kitchen
by the door with a view of the yard.

Eschewing the king sized bed, the plush armchair, the old sofa,
you honour this homemade item because it is rough and well loved.
Here you can sit while we argue
by the pine wood kitchen table
like cats on the garage roof,
and sometimes even make love.

This is your way with the world,
the quirky route you have always traveled
since you clung to the skirts of your mother
with an innocents` desperate fingers
while she struggled from barroom to blackout.

She taught you to keep moving on
to any number of roadside locations
A van ride up the A One,
and then, without phoning, returning
when the loneliness gets far too much
or the pickings begin to grow scarce.

Loneliness is a dark raw wound,
a hurt very few can live with.
So perhaps at the hour you come knocking
child in tow, baggage piled by the gatepost,
to announce you are now here to stay
for a lifetime, not just part of one day,

I will not lock you out;
and if this blood red fruit is in season,
this bitter sweet gift from the angels,
I will carefully cut one into segments
and proffer the choicest slice.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 23rd. - 24th. 2015.

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                 2

A Couple of Dark Quips. 

                 a

Just Once in a Lifetime



My wedding day?

A tear on the edge of my memory.

                 ---


                   b

    Blessing the Globe.



A spade of horse shit and a corn dolly?

This combination should really bring on the clowns.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 25th. 20115.

Chinese Porcelain.

Reflected in the mirror behind us
As we set up another selfie,
The collection of earthenware pots
Displayed on the highest shelf
Above the worktop in my kitchen,
Delicate Chinese porcelain
Placed next to Irish stoneware
Rough as the Antrim hills.

And I wonder, as we peer at the photographs
Flashed up on the miniature screen
Held tentatively in your fingers,
That such a roughcast face as mine
Thumbed out of the clays of London
Does not seem an incongruous partner
To the gracefully sculpted contours
Of your refined Parisian beauty.

My smile looks discrete, self effacing,
While yours bursts out of the picture
Like the image of the golden star
Emblazoned on the sacred Oriflamme.
I turn and look up at the porcelain
That once seemed so perfect to me,
And note how the finest of glazes
Can be flecked with miniscule flaws.

Perhaps I should now replace them
With artifacts of your choosing.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
October 19th. - 21st. 2015.