(1) The Parting.(Revised) (2).Commonplace Tranquility.(Revised).

                     1.

           The Parting.


You departed at lunch time,
Hat not at the usual angle,
Shoulder bag swinging like a sail.

Loneliness does not suit me,
I sit as still as a stone.

A bird with a broken wing
Could not be more frightened,
More uneasy.
Every sound in the near locality,
The Victorian streets and alleyways,
Plainly hostile.

I go indoors to make a cup of coffee.
The gentle bubbling of the percolator
Brings some peace of mind;
But your abrupt departure is hurting me like hell.

Saying goodbye never has been easy,
Even if just a weekend or one day
Pass before the key turns in the lock,
Or the dog goes hyper hearing the clang of the bell.

Meanwhile I think of phoning long term friends,
But their disembodied voices
Reverberating in the earpiece
Accentuate the pain,
Makes distance a reality.
Love, distance really matters.

I turn off the radio
Raw toned Bruckner hurts my troubled mind.

I sit and dream the scent of your long hair
Lingering on the pillow,
Warming our cold bed.
Your northern vowels, so soft and ever youthful,
Heard in every room.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
15th. - 16th. February 2016.
December 3rd. 2016.

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

                      2.

  Commonplace Tranquility.


  Leonardo can go skulk in dusty corners,
Cervantes can hang his lance up in the hall,
  I have turned my back on the European Renaissance,
And now find beauty in common        everyday things.


A muslin curtain slung across a window,
A knife,
              a spoon,
                            a paper cup,
                                                 a plain white bowl,
                                              a sturdy stoneware jug,
A makeshift vase loosely filled with flowers,
A well scrubbed kitchen table.


    Observing simple objects, simple moments
    cools perspectives            pacifies my mind,
                                                 Hints at pure Satori;

                                                                       
                 Cherry blossom in a Kyoto garden;
      more precious to me than my rarest books.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 5th. - 18th. 2016.
December 3rd. 2016.

This poem represents the very heart of my every day philosophy.

Two Poems. (1) Lily plus belle. (2) Thinking of Georgy Ivanov.(Revised)

                           1.

                Lily plus belle.


        Your eleven year old niece
Wants to be a grown up woman,
Reinventing her face with make up
As she leans into the mirror,
Elbows pressed against the glass.
      Her desire to seek perfection
Creates an impudent red scar.


Such affectation could be dangerous
Especially when she gets to dreaming
Of a life she does not know.-
                       The drunken poet, old Li Bai,
Came to grief in a placid river
When he leant across the gunnels to embrace
A bright reflection of the moon.


He thought that he had witnessed
The features of the perfect courtesan
Sparkling in the evening waters.
        Her skin as smooth as porcelain
Polished until it dazzles:
Her painted lips an impudent red scar.


And the air was full of music and wild laughter
As he slipped unnoticed beneath translucent waves.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 11th. - 12th. 2016.

For Josephine and Ivy.
------------------------------------------------------------

                        2.

  Thinking of Georgy Ivanov.


When I get washed in the morning I stare at the glass
And think random thoughts about the world as it is.

I get very bored with conventional folk,
Whatever they say does not really matter.

You don`t have to be young to write fierce poetry,
You just have to learn to be self aware;

But that old yew tree against the wall
Could outstay any words or bits of paper:

The church in it`s shade is eight hundred years old,
But the tree itself is a century older.

Most folk only chatter to please themselves,
They are entranced by their mirrors, and that is all.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 13th. - 14th. - 27th. 2016. 

Written after reading some poems by the great Russian poet Georgy Ivanov, but not in imitation, it is just that my midwinter mood was responsive to his personal zeitgeist.  

Between Two Winter Storms. (Revised)

Today the sky is sackcloth and ashes.
Early spring blossom smothers the earth.

Gaunt trees sway like desolate women
Gathering flowers for a stone cradle.

Ice tears fall hour upon hour
Into a roofless row of houses
Boarded up ready for the wrecker`s ball.

The concrete paths have cracked like china;
The cherished gardens are thick with bracken;
The front doors bang in the truculent wind.

The Routemaster bus takes me deep into town;
I cannot keep my eyes away from the window,
Nothing is how it was last summer.

I note that the street is packed with strangers;
The Bloomsbury Squares unkempt and padlocked,
Their coral red roses hacked down with a saw.

The Empire had lost the Mandate of Heaven,
I read in my book on the Han Dynasty.

Last night the storm smashed slate tiles and fences. . .
I could not find a moment to sleep.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 6th.-7th. - 10th. 2016.

I was on the way to visit the Chinese Porcelain collection at the British Museum when the ideas for this poem came to me. Coral Red is the name given to some plain colour artifacts, so you can make up your minds as to whether the hacked down roses are natural plants or vandalised works of art. I would also like to mention the poems of Du Fu. I originally gave this poem the title After The Storm,but then I read the weather forecast and discovered that the storms were not over, more high winds were predicted. This poem is both personal and political, like all things in life.

(1) Elisabeth. (2). Homage to Wittgenstein.

                       1

                Elisabeth.


Watching you from the alcove
I could never have really guessed
How close to death you had been.

Tonight you danced in the bar
Like a headstrong child at play,
Not a grandma with cervical cancer.

Perhaps your time in intensive care
Put you back in touch with the dreams
You lived for when a youngster;

The park your natural environment
Where you played every hour of the day
Until stars appeared in the sky,

And where once you fell flat in the stream
While chasing a pert butterfly.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 3rd. - 4th. 2016.

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

                        2.

  Homage to Wittgenstein.


Don`t think, look!
The flowers are full of dew;
An insect is drinking.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 22nd. 2016.

(1) January 31st. (New Version). (2) Harrow Weald Bus Station.

                     1.
            
            January 31st.


Already it is the last day of the month,
the New Year stacked with school books,
not now an infant snuggling at the breast,
eyes half closed, torso smeared with blood,
mouth wide open, shaped like an angry O,
but a schoolboy carrying mobile phone and scycle
as he trots off to his lessons.

I sit here shivering at an open window
and count greenshoots nudging through the rough.
I wish I was now outside in the garden,
but in kinder weather, trees coming into bud,
House Martins, louder than my radio,
watching a wary cool cat saunter passed;
and frost a scrap book memory.

An ice bright moon floats high above the rooftops
immune to our enslavement to the seasons
and the irksome ticking of the bedroom clock.
My girlfriend phoned to say her time had passed
and that she has been sick the last few mornings
so that she cannot leave her room.
                                  I take a look at the calendar,
count back the days to when she last lay with me,
then flick the pages forward to September.

"Is this all that life brings to the table", I quietly grumble,
"a rushed parade of births and deaths and marriages?"
I visualise a smart kid playing football,
a schoolboy larking as he quits his class.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
31st. January 2016. 
Completely rewritten 31st. August - September 3rd. 2016.


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

                      2.

Harrow Weald Bus Station.        A collage.


The old man toddling home,
His bags packed with shopping,

The schoolkids do not see him,
They rush by in a swarm.

Life is precious to him.
A pale sky turning crimson.

The high street packed with traffic.
The sound of sirens shrieking.

The school kids bunch together,
They fight to board a bus.

The old man turns a corner:
A parked car blocks my view.

Far above the rooftops
Floats the lonely moon.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 22nd. - 23rd. 2016.
This poem is just a list of events written down as they happened in real time
at dusk on January 22nd.The old man is aged 91 and is a long time friend.

(1) Country Girl. Revised (2) In Ancient China. (3) Song of the Steadfast Servant.

                            1

                   Country Girl.


Funny,
I always think of you with light coloured hair,
Not black, dead straight and thickly lacquered
But windblown and burnished, reflecting the sun;
A hand combed tangle hiding a nest of glittering
                                                                     fireflies,
Or so it seemed. How else could I have explained
those dazzling highlights to myself & to my friends?
But now neat artifice seems to be all the rage,
and everything natural tied back, disguised
and not allowed to mar the urbane icon.
Thus we descend from bright youth
to an artfully glamorous old age
that glosses over reality
for no apparent
reason.


& yet, nowadays, you sing with a delicate sweetness
Far out of your range before,
& I am touched to the heart by this new transcendent
                                                                          beauty,
So bright with the love that passed you by when young.


Oh forget past times,
Forget plans left half done,
They are just old notes scrawled on a bedside scrap pad
Too small to make a fire.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 27th. - 29th. 2016.

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

                           2.

In Ancient China fish were thought to carry messages.


           You have fish for supper most evenings?
            Perhaps I should drop a message into the sea
            And hope that it reaches you.

            I still love you
            But how will you ever know
    this
            Living alone in your room.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 27th. 2016.

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

                       3.

The Song of the Steadfast Servant.


Found true
love is
when all else
is lost.

Found true
as the Lamb was
among the thorns
and rocks.

Found true
on Golgotha
when the Temple fell
to dust.

Found true
love is
when all else
is lost.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 7th. 1973.
January 29th. 2016.

(1) The Real Singing Blackbird. (2) The Girl Who Sailed Away.

                 1.

The Real Singing Blackbird.


Sitting in Trafalgar Square
Watching the fountains play
With the fragile winter sunlight.
This is where, decades ago,
Almost a lifetime in fact,
Although I can hardly believe it,
A blackbird with crippled wings learned to fly,
Her song loud and clear on the airways,
Her maiden flight caught by the cameras
As she upstaged the pert little pigeons,
Those hop and skip procreators,
Those snafflers of cake and sandwiches
Who, like most on the make urban scoundrels,
Do not care for sublime miracles.

This is where I grew up,
Watching the world pass by,
Writing in secret my poems
While the tourists cackled and snapped.

This is where I grew up,
Walked with my very first girlfriend
On every other Sunday.
Here we sat still to observe
The mysterious white wigged lady,
Shrieker of old Beatles numbers,
The occasional Bob Dylan moanathon
Whilst preening her rapier nails.
On the morning that I am thinking of
She was waltzing alone in the fountains,
Her pink brolly floating aloft.

London, my city of dreams,
Fulcrum of half crazed memories,
How can I ever portray you
In a single, fazed out poem,
That takes a side swipe at the truth?
Perhaps I should mention the taste
Of French cigarettes on my tongue,
The deafening chatter of starlings,
The heat of my girl in my arms?
Or perhaps I should write of that blackbird
Soaring far above the Wren steeples,
Rehearsing a banquet of love songs,
But then stealing my secrets away.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 31st. 2015.
January 26th. 2016.

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

                2.

The Girl Who Sailed Away.


We walked under eucalyptus trees
Your hand at rest on my shoulder.
You have lost your South London vowels,
Perhaps our friendship has faltered;


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 3rd. 2015. - January 15th. 2016.