My Blonde Priestess. (New Version).

Perhaps, now that your annual fast is over,
You suddenly thought of me over breakfast
And wished that I was pouring out the coffee,
Passing the toast,
Dipping my spoon into your loganberry jam,
In fact, this pain that has been pounding through
                                                        my brain
Every evening, slightly after eleven,
Reminds me of the headaches that you plagued
                                                          me with
Purely with the power of a thought
Whenever I upset you in the past.

It is now eleven years since I last saw you
On a crowded street in August, just off the main
                                                   drag in Brighton,
The leaves already falling.
You were walking with our daughter up the hill,
Your face almost smothered in a scarf,
Your eyes cast down as you watched your shoes
Tapping out a death march on the pavement.

No, you were not angry as I stood and watched
                                                            you there,
Just aware of a jostling crowd of strangers
Rushing down the hill to find a bar:
And also, unbeknown to me just then,
You were lost in grief for your loved
                                                      grandmother
Who had passed away just the week before.
The grief that you were living through that day
Was far too deep for even me to share.

Yes, we two are very private individuals
Wrapped tightly up in our little worlds
As hermits hide their heads in swathes of cloth.
But at night I sometimes dream you have returned
And are fighting with me for some space in bed.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
July 12th. - 13th. 2016. 
                                               

(1) Anticipation.(2) Legend. (3) My Honest Roughcast Heroes. (New Version).

                 1.

        Anticipation.


Through the fence a flash of starlight,
The sun reflected off your watch
As you walk towards my house.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
July 5th. 2016.
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                 2.


            Legend.


Mount Errigal, a hump backed whale
Beached upon a northern shore
Slowly        melting        into        sky.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 3rd. - July 5th. 2016.
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                    3.

My Honest Roughcast Heroes.


I notice in these photographs a preponderance of shaggy beards,
Perhaps now obligatory for serious poets,
Those cantankerous prophets unsure of man or God
Who roar outrageous jibes at the deaf and dumb,
Or innocuous folk who warily walk on by.

They like to warn non stop, a la Wilfred Owen,
Bemoaning every catastrophe, small or large,
That goes skidding down the byways they drive on
At any given moment, noon or night,
And puts their guru noses out of joint.
But because their audience tends to be peripheral,
Computer jerks, professors, and the like,
They do not seem to haunt the dreams of many,
That is, until a bard is needed quickly
To churn out in the papers, on the telly,
Sentiments designed to edify the throng
In portentous verses, loud and long and empty.
But because their usefulness is superficial,
These Minotaurs of the verb, the studied phrase,
Soon saunter back to being unsung heroes,
The old time oracles of the hi tec world.

But I, not being of a rhetorical disposition,
Light candles for Robert Graves and Sylvia Plath,
Both vertigo sufferers on the crags of love,
And victims of a world spun into chaos.
They learned from diligent practice of their art
That personal poems would always hit the mark,
Expose the whole damn show with one one smart saying,
The raw tip of the poem, an arrow head,
Refined to slice untruth and waffle dead.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
 July 7th. - 9th. - 12th. - August 8th. 2016.
  

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.
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                        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.

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                  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.