Sophie. ( Born a century ago today, May 9th. 1921)

I press the key.
A face I do not recognise lights up the screen.
A girl with candid eyes,
High chubby cheeks,
                                   roughly scissored hair
Scruffed up by a sudden gust of wind.
                                             A southern girl,
Citizen of the ancient town of Ulm;
Her smile so fierce it could defeat all sorrow,
Disarm all foes,
Force her critics to rewrite their verdicts,
Turn SS Guards to Christ.
Sophie Magdalena Scholl, executed 1943
Because she dared to spell out truth to power,
Tell the Nazis that their war was lost;
Tell out loud the crime of Stalingrad;
Tell out loud the gassing of the Jews.
A girl so honest that even Roland Freisler
Felt the ice of truth skewer through his heart
As she stared back at him and did not waver,
His savage deeds mocked by her gentle words.
Perhaps he was the traitor after all,
Perhaps he was the wrecker of the law,
But he was the judge and therefore must condemn her,
Send her to death at twenty one.

I am ashamed to say that until this Sunday morning
I had never heard of Sophie, or her brother,
Their White Rose Movement that dared to out face Hitler
With Christian Love,
                                  With solid Facts and Reason,
With the fearless honesty of thoughtful youth.
"What we wrote and said is also believed by many others,
They just don`t dare express themselves as we did"
She told Judge Freisler as he screamed the spiteful verdict
And sent her swiftly to the guillotine.-
I was born just two months after she was murdered,
And the freedoms that she cherished built my Europe
Out of the graves and ashes of her era;
Out of the ruined cities, the festering wounds of Auschwitz.
She hoped that through her death thousands would be awakened,
Would face down tyranny with words and actions,
Would outlaw fascism for ever more.
But out of their foxholes and bunkers dark gods are re-emerging,
I hope that I dare face them down as powerfully as she did.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 10th. - 11th. 2019.

In memory of Sophie and Hans Scholl, young people who made a massive difference.

A Bitter Isolation.

Brexit has clipped my wings,
I can no longer fly,
Soar over mountains and oceans,
Dance with the stars.

Brexit has dragged me earthwards,
Trapped me on an island,
Dropped me into quicksand
That will slowly suck me under.

I used to be a dreamer,
And some of my dreams came true
When I waltzed to the Berlin Philharmonie,
When I sang in La Fenice.

But now my dreams have been broken,
Torn up and thrown to the wolfhounds
By mobs who spit on reason,
Who love to hate their neighbours.

I love every inch of Europe.
I love every inch of Asia.
My dream was a single community
From Galway to Vladivostok.

But now, like ancient Prometheus,
I have been deprived of all the freedoms;
The freedom to soar like a lark,
The freedom to know my own mind.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 9th. 2019.

Trevor J Potter's Art: (1) Night Train. (Revised Version). (2) History Le...

Trevor J Potter's Art: (1) Night Train. (Revised Version). (2) History Le...:                     1 .            Night Train. Outside the carriage window The night has become spectral, A ghost factory of forensi...

(1) Sharp Winter Light.(2) Meaux.

              1.

Sharp Winter Light.

A delicate, ethereal, early morning,
Bright sunlight reflected through still water,
Through thin ice.
Nothing substantial,
Rock solid, immutable.
Nothing how we believe it should be.

The morning air seems to glisten with crystals,
Ice crystals in the atmosphere,
Invisible to us
But leaving clear traces.
The sky a mirror reflecting blue oceans,
A mirror dazzling deep in God`s eye.

I open the front door and enter the house,
I step out of the sunlight into the shadows,
Into the private space I created.
Out of the World view,
The world and his wife.
I retreat from the jarring confusions of street life
Where peace of mind is a no go area
And I am just a face in the crowd.

But today the street scene outside my front window
Seems to be new made, transfigured, exalted.
I stand at the window, stunned by the beauty
Revealed in a place I thought brash and mundane.

A delicate, ethereal, winter morning,
Everyone that I meet wears a broad smile.
When I enter the house I am a sleepwalker,
Someone cut off from friends and relations.
Someone cut off from the bustle of life.
But today I stepped out into the sunlight
And saw the world as it truly is,
Exquisite and sacred,
Fragile and dazzling,
Paradise in my very own street.

At that moment my heart began to thrum fiercely
As though I had joined an ecstatic dance.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 30th. 2019.


              2.

        Meaux.

Dear Mrs. May
I want to live in Meaux,
My lovely Meaux.
Why do you stand in the way?
Why do you stand in the way?


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
February 4th. 2019.

Epiphany. (Completed Version)

We don`t know how many wise men came.
Three, six, twelve?
Twelve would make sense,
The same number as Christ`s apostles,
And this the Assyrian Church has unequivocally claimed,
And yet the shrine in Cologne contains only three corpses.

But from what secret palaces, what far flung caravansaries
Did these wise men commence with ponies and camels
To trudge the bleak mountain tops, the vast trackless deserts,
To reach the bad lands of Herod the king?
The records are incomplete, the details too hazy
With much emphasis on strange moving stars,
King Herod`s paranoia,
Contemptuous Romans,
The efficacy of believing in the wildest of dreams.

And who were these sages, these cold weary travellers?
Zoroastrians from Persia? Buddhists from Sri Lanka?
                                             Gypsies from Rajasthan?

But a Messiah was deemed far greater
Than any Bodhisattva
And no foreign faiths were welcomed in Judea.
So, from whence did they come? These Stoics? These Shamans?
These Daoists? These Brahmins? These strange righteous Gentiles
To kneel in the dung spattered straw of a stable
And worship the miracle of a new born child?

Perhaps who they were does not really matter,
Only that they followed a spectacular nova
Without really knowing where it would lead them
Or what they would find at the end of the journey. -
The palace of a mighty king? - Surely not a stable?
But when they saw the infant in the arms of Mary,
Filthy with placenta, pressed tight to her shoulder,
It was the love emanating from this helpless nursling
And lighting up the eyes of his teenage mother
That made them kneel, awe struck, humbled, terrified,
And present their gifts as though to the mighty Caesar.

We have few details of their homeward journey,
Only that they kept clear of Masada,
And travelled by an undisclosed new route.
Yet surely all we need to know was written down by Matthew,
Indeed, their trust in hope is all that really matters,
That they witnessed something vital, something extraordinary,
The transfiguration of the commonplace by a mother`s love.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
23rd. - 25th. - 26th. January 2019.
6th. January 2020. - January 6th. 2021.

Trevor J Potter's Art: Two Poems. (1) Wintry Wunderland. (2) Mid January ...

Trevor J Potter's Art: Two Poems. (1) Wintry Wunderland. (2) Mid January ...:               1 .  Wintry Wunderland. A light dusting of morning snow. Icing sugar on the unswept pathways, The marooned cars. The p...

Two Poems. (1) Wintry Wunderland. Revised Version. (2) Mid January Evening, North West London.(Revised).

              1.

 Wintry Wunderland.


A light dusting of morning snow.
Icing sugar on the unswept pathways,
The marooned cars,
The privet hedges,
The winter roses,
Untidy piles of wind blown rubbish,
The sombre relics of a line of trees.
If I place a candle on the garden table,
A festal candle, gold and silver,
I can then, without much niggling trouble
Make believe
The world made new as a burnished platter
Piled high with meringues and Christmas cake.
But the cold wind blowing through my hair
whispers, "Winter is here. Despair. Despair"


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 23rd. - 26th. 2019.
              
              2.

Mid January Evening, North West London.


Milk white moon in a
Smoke blue sky.
The cruel White Goddess, both stone and ivory,
Hauling her secrets across the blank page
Of a January evening.
Frost on the fingertips of the wind.

Mid January evening in Willesden Green.
Desire and deceit,
Greed and fantasy
Bleaching the white lights in the shop windows
To blind would be shoppers
With fierce white lies.
Plastic knives and forks laid
On plastic plates and tables,
These items are perfection, they reflect the lights like silver,
And will surely never break in a million years.

Behind drawn curtains
Of mock Tudor houses
The cruel White Goddess haunts the sad bedrooms
Of on line readers of Mills and Boone.
She mocks the transitions
From adolescence to maturity,
From menopause to old age
With the cut and the thrust of impossible dreams.

Bare trees reaching up to the milk white moon
Bone thin fingers
Bent and arthritic
Imploring the Goddess to bring back springtime
When lovers hugged close beneath green branches
And the breeze was soft as a new shorn fleece.
But the Goddess is mute, she is pure stone and ivory,
She moves oblivious through smoke blue shadows,
A cold white Deity, bleached to perfection,
But fading completely in the morning sun.

I look up at the moon as I stand at the kerbside
Waiting half an hour for a two sixty bus.
She may be just a dead rock that spins round a planet
But this evening she seems both malevolent and holy.

Pale White Goddess, alone but imperturbable.

Frost on the fingertips of the wind.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
January 18th. - 19th. - 20th. - 21st. - 27th. 2019.