Freedom Riders.

Two young people riding piebald ponies
Bareback across the summer fields
Seeking the illusion of perfect freedom
As they guide the ponies into the wind.

The father of the young girl wears a knife
Discreetly tucked into his belt,
A knife to scratch the young lads throat
To force him to make the girl a bride.

But the young folk prefered the heft of the wind
Hard in their faces and threshing their hair
To a lifelong fidelity to a marriage bed
And ten fractious children bawling down stairs.

Secretly at night they would snuggle together
Stunned by the stars glistening in their eyes,
 And they whispered "forever and forever,
We shall live how we love to, not how brute force decides".


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
July 4th. 2016.

This poem developed out of the poem My Country that I wrote and blogged yesterday. This new poem refers to incidents that took place when I was 18, way back in the more innocent 1960`s. My Country is a direct response to the condition of the UK in the summer of 2016.

My Country.

I once lived in a real country,
A country that I traversed and loved.
But now my beautiful country
Has been changed, changed utterly,
Into a replica, a cut price imitation
Of something that my country never was.

A nowhere land, a Hollywood dream factory,
A Film Set mock up of my former home
That sags and falls to pieces in the rain,
Leaving only flotsam down the drain. -
A nightmare land, a cinematic fantasy
Where I am loathed because I love a gypsy.

And because my love is dark, I am told to pack off home,
But where is the open door to my reality?


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

(1) Superficial Love.(Revised Version). (2) Holy Matrimony.

                    1

         Superficial Love. 


You told me I was too parochial,
And too ugly to board with you,
So I cut off my nose to add interest
                                  to my face.

When gauze and lint were removed
You laughed at the predictable outcome,
And declared that a slight improvement
Just would not do,
And that a drastic improvisation
Was needed to shore up the ruin.
                   
We consulted the history books,
Concentrating on old Byzantium
Where party games were the politics
                                    of the day,
And finicky royal eunuchs
Ran pointless, elliptical races
All around the imperial clepsydra
To outpace any new fangled schemes.

We decided that a silver mask
Might add a touch of sparkle and glamour
To the inconvenient absence
So prominent between my eyes.

But love making proved out of the question,
After midnight the mask would start slipping
To reveal up close on the duvet
That fairy tales are a pack of old lies.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 30th. - July 1st. - 2nd. - 7th. 2016.

Note. A clepsydra is a water clock.
--------------------------------------------------------------

                        2.

         Holy Matrimony. (An improvised love poem).).


Girl - I did believe that I chose you
But -
          No No No No -
                                    God chose you
To break me apart - and then to make
                                            me whole.


When I stand alone in front of a mirror
I see a husk -
                      A shredded leaf in winter
Stranded upon the snow.


But when you stand - so proud - beside
                                                          me
I am an oak - broad and strong - at mid
                                                  summer -
Safe from the saw and the axe.


And when you kiss my face in the morning
My heart zings like a gilded aviary
                  adazzle with ten thousand birds.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 6th. - June 30th. - July 1st. 2016.

Two Poems. (1) June 25th. 2016. From the Roof of Tate Modern. (2) Dead Thorn.

                 1.

June 25th. 2016. From the Roof of Tate Modern.


A black spot on a sheet of paper.
An ink blot relentlessly spreading
Like mould on a kitchen curtain.
A tumult of sharks darkening the water
Until the whole surface is scuffed
And clarity becomes impossible.
A distant smudge of cloud spreading east
Until all blue is lost,
And just one splash of red disrupts the greyness,
A patch of blood seeping through a bandage.

We watch the wild storm gathering over London,
And when the thunder cracks above our heads
There is talk of a ghostly Blitz high in the Heavens,
And the Mead Halls of Valhalla imploding like dead stars.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 27th. 2016.

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

                  2.

         Dead Thorn.


That woman with a thorn lodged in her heart
Sat waiting for her husband to return,
Sat grieving quietly by the telephone.
"Only he can cure my pain", she softly whispered.
"Only he can dig this ancient thorn right out".

In due course she telephoned the local doctor,
A man who knew her case from A to Zee.
"But your husband died last December, don`t you remember?
I concluded that he died of no known cause.
But you seemed to think you killed him with a kiss".

"Oh no I did not", the grieving woman whispered.
"He died because we had lost the will to love".


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
June 22nd, - 23rd. 2016.
July 24th. 2020.

Ordinary Love. A Poem for Jo Cox. 1974 - 2016.

It was such an ordinary love,
A young mother`s love for her children,
For her husband,
For her colleagues and her friends,
For her tiny patch of England.

But this ordinary love had made her wise,
Had helped her understand that other folk
Knew joy and pain as she did,
And shared with her a raw humanity.

This wisdom made her travel far and wide
Into the bombed out cities, war wracked lands
Far from the quiet back streets of her childhood,
The safe town she was born in.

She travelled with love burning in her heart,
Burning with the pain that others felt
When they lost their homes, their children, husbands, wives,
To jihad and systemic civil war.

She helped raped women find a home, a refuge:
Syrians find a kinder, gentler land.
Their Human Rights she shouted to the wide world,
Shouted loud,
Her Yorkshire burr eloquent with compassion.

But some folk are deaf and blind and dumb to love,
They think of little, only their good selves:
"Me First" they shriek, at neighbours and the media:
"Me First, and then to Hell with all the rest".

This good woman, she went out to help her neighbours,
The dispossessed, the victims of injustice;
The refugees left helpless at closed borders;
The poor folk knocking on her surgery door.

But one sad man, who hated all she stood for,
Now waited for her with a knife and gun
To cut her down, on a street where she felt safe,
In the quiet Yorkshire town that was her home.

One sad lonely man, blind to the tears of children
Crying for their mother in the night.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter,
June 22nd. - 23rd. 2016. 

This afternoon I joined the thousands in Trafalgar Square gathered to grieve and celebrate Jo Cox. I was moved to tears by the children singing "If I had a hammer", and the intense sad fellowship of the crowd. But I came away more hopeful than I had been when I set out; more hopeful that there are more good people in the world than I had feared. When I returned home I revised this hurriedly written poem, but I have kept the downbeat ending because the sadness has not yet left me. This afternoon I made this pledge with the tousands in the crowd, To Love Like Jo, and I ask all who read this little poem, do please do the same.

Owl and Hawk. A Quartet of Poems about Myth and Nature. (Revised)

I first sketched this quartet of poems during the 1970`s.Originally there were several more poems but I discarded certain deeply negative segments and collated two separate sections to create a single work. The time in which these poems were first sketched was a period of conflict and divisive politics. The Vietnam War had only recently fizzled out and the war in Ireland was growing more and more ferocious day by day. These poems reflect that time of uncertainties, uncertainties that I find are now reflected, as in a smokey mirror, by the raw divisive politics rocking both Britain and the United States of America this tragic month of June. These poems are very raw, and much of the writing is in a style that I now no longer wish to emulate, but I do think that they still posses a fierce validity of their own, so I took them out of my bottom drawer, added a line or two here, changed a word or two there, and have set them out in the order in which I think they should be read.          

        Owl and Hawk.

            First Poem.
The Mad Hermit and the Owl.


"The wind of the wing of madness
Last night passed over me".

                   1.

The Owl shadows the dark wood.
The Owl is the essence of night.
A silent hunter haunting the northern wilderness.
A desolate shadow descending through the pines.

                   2.

I cannot sleep when his fierce cries pierce the moonlit forest.
I cannot sleep when his shadow falls across my window.

I cannot walk free, out of the moonlit forest.
I cannot escape the malignity of that shadow.

My darkened window reflects a sudden movement.
I panic and shake when he passes.

His wing beats echoing through the winter stillness
Awake dark fears in the depths of my mind.

                    3.

In folk law the Owl is a bird of evil omen,
A lord of the underworld come to gather souls,
A portent of evil.
When I hear his shrill cries piercing the snow hushed forest
Those ancient legends flower like wounds in my brain.

                      *

            Second Poem.
           Owl in Winter.


Short days.
The cold nights encourage the work of the Owl,
A feral holocaust on the altars of Nature
Accomplished with impartial efficiency
Between the nightly birth and death of the moon.

Cloaked in his straightjacket of wings
The owl sits still and waits.
A precision crafted machine
Primed to perfection,
His keen eyes cutting the dark like razors
Scan the forest for prey.

The wind threads like a ghost between bare trees
Shaking the undergrowth with tiny waves
That expose the darting movements of a vole.
That instant life and death have just one face.

A cry stark as the winter forests
Acts as prologue to the deed of terror.
Quick talons grip and dig.

Wisely the Owl hones silence like a blade,
His iron secret,
A silence that hangs like Arctic water
Knifing toward the snow.
This is the owl in his moon cold fury,
The barb and craft of a dark vocation
His infinite skill.
Only the sunlight can mellow his actions
Moulding his wings around sleep.

                     *

            Third Poem.
               The Kill.


Deep in the moonlit valley
All life is hushed:
Nothing stirs, nothing wakens,
Nothing shakes the tufted grasses,
Only the quiet breathing of the wind.

Like a scalpel a rodent`s cry
Rips open the womb of night.-
Wing beats thrusting upward
Crush the wild sound.

Scratched on the midnight air a living shadow
The young hawk soars
Riding the breath of the wind.-
For a moment the wood is alive
With a hundred thousand voices
Shrieking alarm.

The shadow cuts across
The surgical light of the moon
Then drops far out of sight.
For a moment the danger is passed.

The panic quickly subsides,
Dies into a subdued whisper,

A whisper softer than the tread of a fox.

                    *

           Fourth Poem.
       Summer Solstice.


                    1.

Beauty stuns my eyes.
I stare at the scorched horizon.

                    2.

Retreating out of the dawn world
The old Owl soars,
Rising like the Phoenix
Ascending into her pyre.

Feathers the colour of embers
Blackened by the desolate rain;
His eyes, earth swallowed fires,
Scorn the light of redemption.

In the anguish of a resurrection,
Sought but not understood,
He darts into the sunlight
That dazzles, torments, then stuns him.

The ferocity of the bright sun
Shuts down his laser vision:
Retreating into his dark cave
He embraces the ashes of sleep.

                    3.

The pale morning light enthrals me.
Midsummer bonfires challenge the stars.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
Quartet commenced December 18th. 1972.
Completed in this format, June 19th. - 20th - 21st. 2016.

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