(1) A Bright May Morning. (Revised) (2) At First Sight.

                1.

A Bright May Morning.


Increasing my sense of loneliness
Your voice echoes down the telephone
A lone flute heard in the distance
A far off bird calling for a mate
Heard in the morning as I struggle to sleep
Chilled by your absence

You told me you loved me when you telephoned
Out of the blue
                          this Monday morning
But now that the truth has at last been spoken
The waiting is crueller than it used to be
When I had jettisoned hope

In a week you shall be well enough to travel-
Your bed in the ward occupied by another-
Once you are here I shall switch off the phone


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 29th. - June 10th. 2018.
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               2.

    At First Sight.


Across the atrium
Your eyes look into mine

Wild lightning
Not a trace of thunder


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 27th. 2018.

Trevor J Potter's Art: (1) My Mother`s Dinner Service. (Rewritten). (2) ...

Trevor J Potter's Art: (1) My Mother`s Dinner Service. (Rewritten). (2) ...:                     1.    My Mother`s Dinner Service. I keep returning to these, my favourite plates, To study every detail of a pictu...

Notes Towards an Unfinished Love Story.

A flicker of sunlight cuts through the curtains. I pull them apart.

Chatting to my neighbour
Across the sunlight dappled wall
About her early roses
While I observe the shadows,

The shadows of the rose trees patterning her face.

I have just today completed
Another grey/black painting,
Not a single primary colour
To cut across the gloom,

No splash of cadmium yellow to split the night from day.

My life is lived in shadow.
My paintings depict shadow.
The shadow of the loneliness
That chills me to the bone,

Chills me every hour you are not painting here beside me.

Colours make our language,
Words are often secondary,
Bland monotones we use
To pass the time of day,

Yet your voice is music to me, a weave of vocal colours
That you spin without a care, my bride with laughing eyes.

My neighbours voice is dull,
Her choice of words monotonous,
Entirely artificial.
Her eyes seem lost in shadow.

Your eyes, they always dazzle. Your kisses sweet as Calvados.

When we sit and paint together
Sunlight dances off our brushes;
The palette that we share
More vivid than summer roses.

Our house will zing with arias when you come back home in June.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 20th. - 22nd. - 25th. 2018.

Backstreet Garden West Hendon.

I look out of the bedroom window at my garden,
A postage stamp of green
Stuck on a large square of concrete
Hemmed in by high brick walls;
A letter going no where.
I share this tiny space with wasps and woodlice,
Ants, worms, slugs, escargot, the occasional butterfly.
Once in a while a bee inspects the weeds and loganberries,
The roses taller than an average man.

I look up at the sun, a rare visitor to this scruffy bit of garden,
And watch its slow trajectory over roof tops,
The vandalised cherry trees.
An average star deep in the multiverse
Around which our planet hovers like a moth
Addicted to heat and guaranteed luminescence.
An average star once worshipped by Attic Greeks
As handsome Helios guiding unruly steeds.

Greek mythology still dazzles my imagination
As powerfully as when a child I read at school
A simplified text of Homer
That cut out all the gods and naughty bits.
I dote on visual images, not incontrovertible equations,
That is why the Attic Greeks made perfect sense
To a child who would rather paint than do his sums,
And had a taste for Keats, Shakespeare and Shelley.

My garden only catches the evening sun
When our ageing star is dipping in the west
En route to the hills of California,
Not the deeps of Okeanos and a well earned night in bed.
This patch of ground is so tiny, so inconsequential,
That passers by hardly notice it exists
When rushing to and fro from home to work,
Or making a bee line for the Claddagh Ring.
But I can sit outside in the golden hour of light
And read The White Goddess, The Guardian, Salman Rushdie,
The Bible, early Marx, my Homer with the suitors put back in.
Or set my telescope up at 9 o`clock - upon the garden table -
And look towards Andromeda, or the russet face of Mars.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 18th. 2018.

Toy Box.

Writing my poems is like opening up a toy box,
A magical toy box packed with wayward puppets
That never obey the fingers that tug the strings,
Or lie stone still when packed away to slumber.
The Moor, the Ballerina, and china faced Petrouchka
Are placid little dolls compared to these
Creatures of mayhem and unreasonable frivolity
That try to take control of my comfy little world.

I dip into the toy box every now and then
Trusting luck, not judgement, as I seek for new ideas
Down in the secret depths of the old container.
Out pop a dazzle of colours, a free for all of images
Vying for attention, offering phoney love
As I try to formulate order out of chaos, find a meaning
Where a meaning never was. Eventually circles are squared,
Orderly lines are drawn, puppets put in their places
And taught to dance to the beat of the wizard`s wand.

All this seems to happen without help or hindrance,
Unplanned, unscheduled, no choreography assembled.
A meticulous brand new poem, all prim and proper,
Shapes itself onto the page, pirouettes out of the toy box
Without a "by your leave", or a nod of "thanks" to the author.
Okay. So that`s one more scrap of verse to slot into the folder
But how I came to write it, I really cannot say.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 14th. 2018.

Owl in Winter. (Revised).

Short days.
The cold nights encourage the work of the Owl,
Sharpen his appetite,
Test his skill.
Between the birth and death of the silent moon
He must make a kill.

Hunched in his jacket of wings
The Owl sits still and waits,
His heart scarcely beating. -
A precision crafted machine
Primed to perfection
By robot engineering,
His keen eyes, laser slicing the dark,
Scan the forest for prey.

The wind, incising the undergrowth like a surgeon
Employing a scalpel to make a perfect cut,
Reveals the zigzag movements of a vole
Darting for cover.
Keen eyes examine the trauma.
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 claw.

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.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
December 18th. 1972. - September 6th. 2012.
June 17th. - 18th. 2016. - May 11th. - 12th. 2018.

Mill Hill. (Plus Note to Poem).

I love to walk in these fields at midnight,
Feel the earth breathing beneath my feet,
A stressed out mother deep in slumber.

I love to sit still on the south facing slope,
Watch galaxies pulse through magical skies,
A trillion heart beats in the tumult of space.

I love especially the warm June nights
When I can hear wandering foxes cry
Across distances only the fiercest would travel.

This is my dream time, private and holy,
When I can look further than daylight allows,
Or sense the depths lost far beneath silence
Where linger the ghosts of ancestral voices:

Ancestors who farmed where executives` houses
Now litter the fields where hay was once scythed,
And Wilberforce built his plain little church.

I love to walk in these fields at midnight,
The slope overlooks where the farm once nestled
Among English Elms taller than spires.

But the trees have all gone, and the grand little houses
Huddle together, row upon row,
Like strangers lost in the promised land.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
August 1966. - May 5th. - 6th. - 9th. 2018.

Note to Poem. This poem remains very much an example of the style that I was trying to achieve in the nineteen sixties when I was close to the London Hippies, but never fully integrated into their life style. While approving their interest in communal living and mysticism, I was critical of their lazy thinking and the taking of mind altering drugs. I sketched the prototype to this poem in 1966, but could never pull the various strands together to weave a completed picture. It was only when I discovered that members of my mothers` family had farmed fields on what is now the edge of the green belt to the north of London that I was given a context in which to place my ideas. They farmed the land as far back as the earliest years of the nineteenth century, and witnessed the building of St. Paul`s Church that was founded by William Wilberforce  because the handful of local villagers were having to walk several miles to attend the Sunday services. The suburban housing that encroached on the heights of Mill Hill in the first forty years of the twentieth century, seem banal and out of place in the context of the remaining fields and the ragged clumps of trees and bushes.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter. May 9th. 2018.