1.
Palmyra Recalled.
I travelled down town to visit a memory,
A stone arch erected in Trafalgar Square
Untainted by the raw blood of Palmyra,
The heads of scholars mangled in the sand.
I touched the arch and dreamed the history,
The ancient texts and buildings we have lost,
Scrubbed out by the cruel winds of the desert,
Crushed to dust by crowbar, mallet, axe.
I count among my forebears western Shia
Who would not break a cup, a vase, a pot
Without recourse to tears, self recrimination
Because the labourers art had been defiled.
They could never bomb a town, murder a child
To sanctify this complex world for Allah.
For them divinity led them through the dance
And blessed the kisses husbands give their brides.
My family has always known that truth is beauty,
And not crushed ashes scattered under grass,
And so I touch this virtual Roman arch
To try and find the beauty we have lost.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 20th. 2016.
--------------------------------------------------
2.
The Rogue Doorbell.
Ringing, without being touched
by the wind or an outstretched finger,
my doorbell, apparently with a mind
of its own, shocks me out of my nap,
my body curled tight in the Windsor chair,
my head pressed down on the table.
Perhaps my dream was a dynamo,
powering thought with invisible muscle
to ring the bell and wake me up
before my neck became permanently cricked
and my face was rubbed raw on the wood;
or perhaps there had been a minor earthquake
that displaced the delicate plastic buzzer
and shook the hallway with carillons.
I will simply remark, that when I lifted the curtain
there was no one in sight on the moonlit pathway,
the gate remained locked, the way I had left it,
with the latch pressed firmly down.
I settled back in my chair to think things over,
and then I recalled I had been dreaming of Leila,
an old flame I have tried to put out of my mind,
but my heart skipped two beats when I remembered her name.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 18th. - 19th. - 22nd. 2016.
August 29th. 2016.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
3.
Cold Spring.
Hazy moon
The eye of God full of tears
Over the arch of Palmyra
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 21st. 2016.
Thursday, 21 April 2016
Saturday, 16 April 2016
Music Frozen in Lost Time.(Revised)
Listening to Satie
I dream the smile of my Sufi love
Who renounced me
To dance
To sing her way
Into the the Hyacinth scented hands
Of Allah.
And I must sit alone at night,
A book of verse
A cup of wine
But Thou no longer with me,
Only the shadow of your smile
Sheltering my fragile dreams from moonlight
That would freeze me into forgetfulness,
Into a deep anarchic terror
As I sit at home
A reluctant hermit
Quarantined in my loneliness.
Listening to Satie,
Music frozen in lost time,
I dream the girl that once I knew
Skateboarding down a hill in Brighton
Fists punching scorching morning sunlight,
Hair caught free
By the salt white seaside wind
Of early summer,
My photo lodged inside her pocket
Then her secret talisman.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 16th. - 17th. 2016.
(1) April 23rd. 1616 & All That.(2) The Lost Refugee.
1.
April 23rd. & All That.
Theatre people do not wait for death,
They strive and play until the final curtain,
Then step aside when the spot lights dim.
Anne Shakespeare did not phone the press,
She simply laid her husband in the dust
Then moved on with her besom and her bed.
When my time comes, play the fife and drum,
Then lay me down among my fellow gypsies,
A dash of greasepaint tarting up my looks,
And at my head place thirty seven books.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 16th. 2016.
---------------------------------------------------------
2.
The Lost Refugee.
Freed from the security of the
torture chamber
Street life frightened him
And he walked alone among the shadows.
Later, on reflection, he thought
It had been so much easier to fall
among cruel thieves
Than to attempt this second birth.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 2nd. - May 1st. 1988.
April 3rd. - 16th. 2016.
April 23rd. & All That.
Theatre people do not wait for death,
They strive and play until the final curtain,
Then step aside when the spot lights dim.
Anne Shakespeare did not phone the press,
She simply laid her husband in the dust
Then moved on with her besom and her bed.
When my time comes, play the fife and drum,
Then lay me down among my fellow gypsies,
A dash of greasepaint tarting up my looks,
And at my head place thirty seven books.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 16th. 2016.
---------------------------------------------------------
2.
The Lost Refugee.
Freed from the security of the
torture chamber
Street life frightened him
And he walked alone among the shadows.
Later, on reflection, he thought
It had been so much easier to fall
among cruel thieves
Than to attempt this second birth.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 2nd. - May 1st. 1988.
April 3rd. - 16th. 2016.
Wednesday, 13 April 2016
(1) A Mysterious Inscription in a Favourite Book, "Ann 1952". (Revised Version).(2) Night on the Underground.(The Gaze of the Beloved)
1
A Mysterious Inscription in a Favourite Book, "Ann 1952". (Revised Version).
The words on the page opposite
Are puzzling me.
I do not recognise her name,
Nor do I know the hand;
And the address scrawled quickly down
Is of a house I have never visited
In a street I have never seen.
My imagination fights to fill the gaps,
Some place on the south west coast comes to mind,
Far from the cut and thrust of Central London.
In 1952 I was only nine,
Rubbish at sport and not too good at maths,
And a good ten years before I bought this book
On a sudden whim one day in Oxford Street,
The poems of Yeats then being unfamiliar.
Perhaps this woman is someone I once kissed,
Or failed to kiss as I dawdled by her side;
Someone who thought it might be worth her while
To write her name down in my favourite book
As we talked like friends inside a crowded pub,
Or wandered out of doors in wind and rain.
I cannot now recall her speaking voice,
Or the cut and colour scheme of her dress,
Or whether a kiss had happened after all,
But I honestly don`t believe it.
All that remains now is this faded message
Adding interest to an undistinguished page
That the printer had left blank, redundant and unnumbered.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 11th. - 12th. - 13th. - 16th. 2016.
For all the would be friends we only encounter once.
This poem is an attempt at expressing the thought process in all its fluid movement and roughness.
----------------------------------------------------------------
2
Night on the Underground.(The Gaze of the Beloved).
Disguised as birds
Your sentences captivate my mind
Like cruel kisses
Making me your prisoner,
La victime de votre chanson.
Your inattentive lover
Commences chapter nine of
The Einstein Intersection
And coughs as he turns the page.
Wishing to re-evaluate
The beauty of morning birdsong
I scrawled El mirar de la Maja
On my borrowed laptop
As a note for future reference.
Could this be love at first sight?
I mutter to myself
While staring at the carriage floor
Strewn with weekend litter.
The clatter of your footsteps
As the doors slide open and shut
Expresses a tart response.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 9th. 1984. - April 3rd. 2016.
This poem was originally sketched in 1984 at the time of the breakup with my then a wife, and that breakup is alluded to quite clearly, especially in the reference to The Einstein Intersection, the prize winning book by Samuel R Delany that my ex wife was reading at the time, but I hasten to add that the contents of that book had no influence upon our relationship difficulties.
A Mysterious Inscription in a Favourite Book, "Ann 1952". (Revised Version).
The words on the page opposite
Are puzzling me.
I do not recognise her name,
Nor do I know the hand;
And the address scrawled quickly down
Is of a house I have never visited
In a street I have never seen.
My imagination fights to fill the gaps,
Some place on the south west coast comes to mind,
Far from the cut and thrust of Central London.
In 1952 I was only nine,
Rubbish at sport and not too good at maths,
And a good ten years before I bought this book
On a sudden whim one day in Oxford Street,
The poems of Yeats then being unfamiliar.
Perhaps this woman is someone I once kissed,
Or failed to kiss as I dawdled by her side;
Someone who thought it might be worth her while
To write her name down in my favourite book
As we talked like friends inside a crowded pub,
Or wandered out of doors in wind and rain.
I cannot now recall her speaking voice,
Or the cut and colour scheme of her dress,
Or whether a kiss had happened after all,
But I honestly don`t believe it.
All that remains now is this faded message
Adding interest to an undistinguished page
That the printer had left blank, redundant and unnumbered.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 11th. - 12th. - 13th. - 16th. 2016.
For all the would be friends we only encounter once.
This poem is an attempt at expressing the thought process in all its fluid movement and roughness.
----------------------------------------------------------------
2
Night on the Underground.(The Gaze of the Beloved).
Disguised as birds
Your sentences captivate my mind
Like cruel kisses
Making me your prisoner,
La victime de votre chanson.
Your inattentive lover
Commences chapter nine of
The Einstein Intersection
And coughs as he turns the page.
Wishing to re-evaluate
The beauty of morning birdsong
I scrawled El mirar de la Maja
On my borrowed laptop
As a note for future reference.
Could this be love at first sight?
I mutter to myself
While staring at the carriage floor
Strewn with weekend litter.
The clatter of your footsteps
As the doors slide open and shut
Expresses a tart response.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 9th. 1984. - April 3rd. 2016.
This poem was originally sketched in 1984 at the time of the breakup with my then a wife, and that breakup is alluded to quite clearly, especially in the reference to The Einstein Intersection, the prize winning book by Samuel R Delany that my ex wife was reading at the time, but I hasten to add that the contents of that book had no influence upon our relationship difficulties.
Thursday, 7 April 2016
(1) Storm Damage. (2) At Belsize Park. (3) A Letter to Allen Ginsburg, Too Late for him to Read.(Revised)
1.
Storm Damage.
I did not know the winds were strong enough.
The tree lay stretched across the road,
Blocking the tarmacked entrance
To the landscaped cemetery.
The weight of four hundred stately years
furrowed into the blackness.
This reminded me of that dead Roe Deer
I had observed with a coarse, outraged excitement
One misspent August Bank Holiday
half a lifetime ago,
Nature seemed then a barbaric province to me
And suave dreams of urban decadence
Had sanitised my nickle plated world view.
Remembering the torso broken in many places,
The long black tongue festering in the mud,
I walked quickly by, kicking at the red leaves
like a small boy rejecting his favourite toy,
For no apparent reason
Except, perhaps, that human love seemed fallible
And could not mitigate his savage grief.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 6th. - 7th. 2016.
In Memoriam Dan Coffey, a fallen oak.
--------------------------------------------------
2.
At Belsize Park.
A solitary girl inside the carriage.
A closed book dropped without much care.
A pressed carnation half on view.
Somewhere a cold wind blowing.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 23rd. 2016.
------------------------------------------------------
3.
A Letter to Allen Ginsburg, Too Late for him to Read.
(Written in response to Allen`s poem, Homage to Vajracarya).
Allen
you found the sun and moon on your plate
One red hot morning in India
And sat bold upright in wonder.
Allen, this sort of thing rarely happens to me,
But then I am not naive.
I am very un-American
And I just don`t have cosmic visions at the
breakfast table,
Especially when I am late for the Thameslink train,
Or the tube to Covent Garden.
In fact I am very like the Han Chinese,
Practical to my boot laces,
But with a taste for Earl Grey Tea.
However I do still read your poems from
time to time
To catch a view through seismic cracks and visions.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 23rd. - April 7th.- 8th. 2016.
Storm Damage.
I did not know the winds were strong enough.
The tree lay stretched across the road,
Blocking the tarmacked entrance
To the landscaped cemetery.
The weight of four hundred stately years
furrowed into the blackness.
This reminded me of that dead Roe Deer
I had observed with a coarse, outraged excitement
One misspent August Bank Holiday
half a lifetime ago,
Nature seemed then a barbaric province to me
And suave dreams of urban decadence
Had sanitised my nickle plated world view.
Remembering the torso broken in many places,
The long black tongue festering in the mud,
I walked quickly by, kicking at the red leaves
like a small boy rejecting his favourite toy,
For no apparent reason
Except, perhaps, that human love seemed fallible
And could not mitigate his savage grief.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 6th. - 7th. 2016.
In Memoriam Dan Coffey, a fallen oak.
--------------------------------------------------
2.
At Belsize Park.
A solitary girl inside the carriage.
A closed book dropped without much care.
A pressed carnation half on view.
Somewhere a cold wind blowing.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 23rd. 2016.
------------------------------------------------------
3.
A Letter to Allen Ginsburg, Too Late for him to Read.
(Written in response to Allen`s poem, Homage to Vajracarya).
Allen
you found the sun and moon on your plate
One red hot morning in India
And sat bold upright in wonder.
Allen, this sort of thing rarely happens to me,
But then I am not naive.
I am very un-American
And I just don`t have cosmic visions at the
breakfast table,
Especially when I am late for the Thameslink train,
Or the tube to Covent Garden.
In fact I am very like the Han Chinese,
Practical to my boot laces,
But with a taste for Earl Grey Tea.
However I do still read your poems from
time to time
To catch a view through seismic cracks and visions.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 23rd. - April 7th.- 8th. 2016.
Friday, 1 April 2016
(1) Don`t Deny Me This. (2) A Sad Farewell to Daniel Coffey. (Revised Ending).
1.
When I am about to die
Put me where I can see the stars,
The moon in her perfect beauty,
The sun set - the sun rise.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 2nd. 2018.
*
2.
Farewell old rebel dancer,
Dear Breathless Dan,
King of the soft shoe shuffle,
At last you have broken loose
From the iron chains of gravity,
The locks and bars of time,
To merge with the sunless morning breeze
Sashaying through the battered Cavan trees
That often swayed in line to your Country Music
Sent pulsing through them morning night and noon
From over the hated border.
Farewell old friend,
Farewell old nifty Jiver,
No more will the winding mountain path
Be graced by the delicate lift and tread
Of your air soft blue suede shoes,
Or the birds that swoop over your cottage roof
Be out gunned by Bill Haley and his Comets.
But the lakeside farm where you spent your early childhood,
That was your proper home,
Your intimate heart of Ireland:
A rural landscape shaped by wind and rain.-
The night long rustling of the farmyard trees,
The knock of the water nudging withered reeds
The nearest things to music.-
And for ever after the picture book of your life,
That battered album of refracted dreams,
Would be opened at these pages
Packed with tattered photos;
The broad loch crowded with a flock of islands;
The horses quiet in the mist grey meadows;
The orchard red with apples.
Farewell old Rock n Roller,
Fermanagh will seem less rich and rare without you.-
The spring flowers in your garden
Droop low in the morning rain.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 31st. - April 1st. - May 28th. 2016.
September 2nd. 2018.
For Daniel James Coffey, great Rock n Roller and Irishman of ancient family.Born 1941.Died Easter Day morning 2016.
When I am about to die
Put me where I can see the stars,
The moon in her perfect beauty,
The sun set - the sun rise.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
September 2nd. 2018.
*
2.
Farewell old rebel dancer,
Dear Breathless Dan,
King of the soft shoe shuffle,
At last you have broken loose
From the iron chains of gravity,
The locks and bars of time,
To merge with the sunless morning breeze
Sashaying through the battered Cavan trees
That often swayed in line to your Country Music
Sent pulsing through them morning night and noon
From over the hated border.
Farewell old friend,
Farewell old nifty Jiver,
No more will the winding mountain path
Be graced by the delicate lift and tread
Of your air soft blue suede shoes,
Or the birds that swoop over your cottage roof
Be out gunned by Bill Haley and his Comets.
But the lakeside farm where you spent your early childhood,
That was your proper home,
Your intimate heart of Ireland:
A rural landscape shaped by wind and rain.-
The night long rustling of the farmyard trees,
The knock of the water nudging withered reeds
The nearest things to music.-
And for ever after the picture book of your life,
That battered album of refracted dreams,
Would be opened at these pages
Packed with tattered photos;
The broad loch crowded with a flock of islands;
The horses quiet in the mist grey meadows;
The orchard red with apples.
Farewell old Rock n Roller,
Fermanagh will seem less rich and rare without you.-
The spring flowers in your garden
Droop low in the morning rain.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 31st. - April 1st. - May 28th. 2016.
September 2nd. 2018.
For Daniel James Coffey, great Rock n Roller and Irishman of ancient family.Born 1941.Died Easter Day morning 2016.
Thursday, 31 March 2016
Love Sonnet.
God spoke, and you were made.
God spoke, and all my future children touched the stars.
God spoke, and all that ever was became reborn today.
God spoke, and then the universe stopped still for just one night.
God spoke, and then you kissed me while I slept.
God spoke, and you and I became one person.
God spoke, and we were born and died and reborn in each other.
God spoke, and then I kissed you while you danced.
God spoke, and then you snuggled close beside me.
God spoke, and then we closed the door and made one single world.
God spoke, and then our world became a garden for our friends.
God spoke, and all our future children touched the morning sun.
God spoke, and then we worshipped.
God spoke, and I regained my life through you.
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 30th. 2016.
For Ivy.
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