Sylvia. (Revised).

So this is where it happened,
In the rooms above this blue plaque,
Behind locked doors
On a freezing winter morning.
Here where the policeman stood,
The pressmen took their photos,
The neighbours talked,
A poet is remembered,
My teacher and my friend.

You are part of who we are now,
Lodged in our DNA,
In books and grubby mortar,
The crowded Underground,
The streets we hustle out of
To get from A to B.
You are part of the air we breathe in,
Just like Keats and Shakespeare,
Milton, Yeats and Shelley,
A sweet American girl
Cut down by raging sorrow,
Your cry not just an echo,
But etched into the marrow,
The solid London clay,
The back bone of our history.

I hear you in these wet streets,
In Regent`s Park, in Chalcot Square,
At noon on Primrose Hill.
Your voice is never silent,
But shivers through the small woods,
The tight North London suburbs,
The scrum in Camden Market,
The heights of Hampstead Heath.
A voice that cuts straight into
The hallowed euphemisms
We construct to section grief.

Today in Fitzroy Road
I stand staring at your window
Just like a three day tourist
With one less box to tick.
I recall my teenage self
Sat awkwardly at your table,
Your Biro in my right hand,
A thesaurus at my elbow,
But unable to write one word.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 31st. - November 11th. 2017.

Trevor J Potter's Art: August Bank Holiday, Bankside. (Revised).

Trevor J Potter's Art: August Bank Holiday, Bankside. (Revised).: Exposed by the tide The old quay rots On the grey beach. Commerce has moved east from the city, Colonising the broad wet lands Once r...

August Bank Holiday, Bankside. (Revised).

Exposed by the tide
The old quay rots
On the grey beach.

Commerce has moved east from the city,
Colonising the broad wet lands
Once rich with wild life
But denuded of people.
The cold reed beds
And swampy islets
Where the river slowly seeps into the sea.

And now
Where the porpoise once leapt the low wave
Tankers crowd into the bleak Thames estuary
Waiting to be eased into harbour
By the squat tugs
And phone calls in a mix and match of languages.

Today I stroll among the carefree tourists
Who bring their innocent carnivals to Bankside.
They snap blurred selfies where wherries once tied up,
And cranes were lowered to honour Churchill`s passing.
Beneath our feet, two thousand years of history
Underpins the pavement, but slowly crumbles,
Breaks down into slurry,
The liquid silt that shifts beneath the concrete
With the ebb and flow of the river.

"No thing is solid,
No thing is as we see it";
Mutters the ferryman
As the prow cuts into the neap tide,
The weight and tug of the currents
That buckle the placid surface.
"We honour pipe dreams
But truth gets hooked in the undertow".

The clock at St. Pauls
Chimes each passing quarter.
Exposed by the tide
The old quay rots
On the grey beach.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 27th. - 28th. - 30th. - 31st. 2017. 

Trevor J Potter's Art: Paradiso. (New Version).

Trevor J Potter's Art: Paradiso. (New Version).: Our horses huddle in the August heat haze, Little piebald miracles on the verge of sleeping, Little vagabonds of the hills and valleys. ...

Paradiso. (New Version).

Our horses huddle in the August heat haze,
Little piebald miracles on the verge of sleeping,
Little vagabonds of the hills and valleys.
These sons and daughters of Olympian Pegasus
Ridden in dreams by wistful children.

Stars spin iridescent in the evening stillness,
They seem to sanctify the vacant spaces
No saint can contemplate without despairing.
Dusk descends early as summer grows old,
And a chill wind warns of a grey September.

The horses, they dream of those gypsy dealers
Who once rode them bare backed down the rapids
To sharpen dull wits for market trickery.
That was the morning we discovered Elysium,
The pounds cascading from out of our pockets.

That was the morning we bought the horses
From the gold toothed haggler
With eyes well hidden.
That was the morning we found that Elysium
Was barred and shuttered to folk with no income.

Tonight I am standing alone in my garden
And I think of the horses, tethered to fences
In a part of the country I now rarely visit.
They sleep beneath stars that could burn up the oceans
Or fill every planet with gardens of roses.

And I think of young Ivy, felled by a bully,
Lying unconscious, her black eyes unfocussed,
But ears tuned in to the murmurs of doctors.

Perhaps she dreams of our four little horses,
Piebald truculents feigning docility.
Perhaps she is dreaming of galloping bare backed
Into the rivers and over the hedgerows.

Perhaps she is dreaming of nothing at all,
But dances alone through the vacant spaces,
Dancing where no saint dare to wander,
But blessed by the power of a million suns.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 19th. - 20th. - 22nd. - 23rd. 2017.

For Ivy, drifting in and out of a coma.
She has been given a radio so that she can listen to music.
I have tried to integrate dream and reality in this poem.

Love.

Love is a fierce and dangerous thing,
A dark torrent under the skin,
Bruising the surface when we catch the stone
Thrown into the air by an unwary stranger
Just passing by,
Just passing time.

And we are lost in the mirror of the eye
Of a stranger who seems to study us
Like the old Red Queen confronting Alice
In the lost garden of talking flowers.
She sees nothing,
Only her features,

Features reflected back to her looking
But twisted as though by rippled glass.

Love is a fierce and dangerous thing,
A torrent rushing over the rapids
Breaking small boats upon the rocks,
Breaking them into a thousand pieces
That drift away
To vanish in a distant ocean.

Love can never be boxed and indexed,
Dammed at source,
Kept in order.
Love breaks every rule and makes none,
A dark torrent under the surface
Bruising the skin when the stone is caught.

And yet without love we are nothing at all,
Not even the echo of a strangers voice.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 17th. 2017.

Thamar.(New Revised Version)

The sound of thunder in the mountains.

Thamar walking in the garden,
A thorn in her heart:
A brother`s knife
Pressed deep into her naked belly
Spilling blood the colour of roses.

Incest was an Imperial custom

Sustained in Egypt - loathed in Judea. 

Amnon lies dead in the valley,
The sister he raped
Is white with ashes;
The baby clinging to her shoulder
Chokes on milk tainted with wood smoke.

Thamar would have married her brother;
Would have smashed the emptied wine glass
Under her heel
As she made her vows.
But Amnon`s love had turned to hatred
Because she offered him forgiveness.

The sound of thunder in the mountains.

The cries of soldiers drunk on murder.
Sabres dipped in Amnon`s blood
Brandished at the waning moon.

Thamar weeps in the sheltered garden;
The baby clinging to her shoulder
Alienates her even from herself.

She has felt the shadow of the wing of madness
Freeze the nape of her neck.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 14th. - 15th. 2017.
September 29th. 2017.

Note. I prefer the spelling Thamar to the more usual Tamar. I was surprised to read that King David would have allowed a brother and sister, (his Children), to marry each other to protect the honour of the wronged woman. The baby only brings desolation.