Listening to You Read. (Revised).

               Listening to You Read

(In Memoriam Anne Sexton and John Lennon).


Listening to you read I become American,
A citizen of that eastern seaboard world
I dearly wanted to move to,
               Wanted to be native of when young;
A citizen who was born and bred mid way
On a ship                         or a slow Dakota.

A citizen                    but never quite at home.

                                          That was before
Three bullets had hit their mark,
Filleting,
                Shredding John`s back
As though it were a curtain of rice paper,
A curtain so thin it was instantly torn apart.

His still beating heart attached to nothing
                                                   sustainable,
Danced out of time in the surgeon`s
                                            delicate fingers
As he tried to fix it to the torn aorta. -
The heart skipped and danced like a small
                             child playing hop scotch,
Skipping from square to square,
                           From moment to moment
Until the world veered crazily out of orbit
And all the numbered squares blurred into one.

From that day on I feigned to hate America,
To hate myself for having loved too well
The Manhattan neighbourhood where Lennon died.
I turned my back on all I had once been,
Erased all dreams of southern California,
Redacted memories of New York City,
And told my friends I had never seen the place.
But then tonight I heard your smoke cracked voice
On a scratchy tape you made in nineteen seventy:
    -  Your poems keen as scalpels  - blunt as bullets.

Anne, listening to you read
          I recovered something I did not want to know,
That I am not a foreigner where the pilgrims landed,
That I was taught to think and write by East Coast poets,
Yourself, young Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell.
I have always thought myself an American poet
But a misplaced love of England kept me here in London,

A vibrant town perhaps, but never snug and homely. -

I have often strolled by the Thames on wintry evenings

             Alone and missing the talk of American friends..


 Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 28th. - 29th. - 31st. 2020. - October 13th. 2020.-

November 7th. 2020. - January 24th. - 25th. 2021.  
Born in London, Since my early teens I have had dual nationality. I like being an international person, a "Citizen of Nowhere" as Theresa May once pronounced, but I have deep roots in place and culture. My roots spread thousands of miles. - I thought this poem was going to be written in two parts, but I have only needed to add two lines to complete it.

(1) Washed Out by Rain. (A Lament at the Autumnal Equinox) (2) September.

                        1.

   Washed Out by Rain.


The world is silver grey.
Wall paper world.
The rain falling steadily,
Washing out the sunlight
Creating unreality.
The world is silver grey.

I look out at the world,
The wallpaper flatness,
The silver grey flatness
Of the world outside my window,
The world outside my house,
My home,
My hermit cell.
I look upon an empty street
But do not miss the people.

I look out at the greyness,
The silver screen vacuity
Of a world without horizons,
A world without a soul.
A world emptied of bright colour,
The laughter of school children. -

The rains dissolve clear vision,

Clarity fading into strangeness.

I look out through the window
At a rain dashed empty street scene
Shrunk to stencilled flatness
Like a pattern on the wall.
September has come early,
We enter the season of sad dreams.

I have learned to live alone,
To trust in my own reality,
To ignore the drab grey scene
Outside my front room window. -
Wallpaper world
Stencilled on my retina,
I walk away from you.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter,
August 26th. - September 22nd. 2020.
                   
                    2.

            September.


Tomorrow starts September;
   It is not autumn yet, but
I can smell the backyard fires.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
August 31st. 2020. 

Trevor J Potter's Art: August 30th. 2013. (New Version).

Trevor J Potter's Art: August 30th. 2013. (New Version).: "Today all Ireland is weeping But, as usual                 No one is listening". The pain of ancestral hurt Enforced a sudde...

Trevor J Potter's Art: My Lost Gypsy Brother. (New Longer Version).

Trevor J Potter's Art: My Lost Gypsy Brother. (New Longer Version).: Today is a day of bad bad news, No wonder the wind shook the windows all night, The rain blowing in under the eaves And soaking the beds...

My Lost Gypsy Brother. (New Longer Version).

Today is a day of bad bad news,
No wonder the wind shook the windows all night,
The rain blowing in under the eaves
And soaking the bedside furniture;
Today is a day of bad bad news.

I remember you sat by my bedside one winter
When I was laid low with a bout of flu
Unable to sit up straight and talk.
The seat you sat on has been wrecked by the rain
And will have to be sawn up and binned.

Today is a day of bad bad news,
But you always said it would rain when you died
Because you were loved by the angels.
I thought you were telling another daft story
But last night the rain was torrential.

The stories you told were always just daft,
And your mind never understood logic,
You were a true gypsy lad who lived the old ways
Until the Tories made that life unlawful.
They dubbed you a scrounger, a liar, a cheat,
So you took to raw spirits and perished of cancer.
Today is a day of bad bad news.

Doctor Johnson defined the Tories as bandits
In his Dictionary of the English Language,
A definition still true after hundreds of years.
Doctor Johnson was kinder to the old gypsy folk,
They were good honest nomads, neither thieves
                                                       nor marauders:
They were refugee soldiers from eastern regimes.

But today is not a day for anger old friend,
It is a day for tears and the planting of flowers,
In the fields you played in when a youngster.
Wild flowers that will spread over moorland and meadow,
A garden vivacious with bees and with birdsong;
A garden where you might trace the footprints of angels.

Today is a day of bad bad news.
The wind shook the windows and doors all night,
The rain forcing entry under the eaves.
I hope you could see the stars when you died.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
August 21st. - 25th. 2020.
For Mcgill died this morning in his early fifties.
I had to write this poem simply because my heart was breaking.

Trevor J Potter's Art: Two Love Poems.(1) Wild Ponies.(Revised Version). ...

Trevor J Potter's Art: Two Love Poems.(1) Wild Ponies.(Revised Version). ...:                           1 .                   Wild Ponies. (Revised Version). Riding unbridled ponies across cold fields, The wind sc...

English Gypsy Music.

 True flamenco comes only from Andalusia,
My Roma friends have a different kind of music,
A fierce unaccompanied cry into the unforgiving wind,
Into the rainy nights of England.
But then the gypsy is honoured on the hard streets of
                                                                       Granada;
The duende stinging the soul as they clap and whirl,
Eyes glittering - dark - lit by Pluto`s fire.
In London the gypsy is outcast, an almost invisible
                                                                        stranger,
A refugee from a thousand years of sorrow,
Christ`s cruel nails hammered through flesh and sinews.
But the songs of these English outcasts are also fierce
                                                                  with duende,
The plight of the sword pieced bull is also in this music,
But there are no exhortations to Allah -
                                  no thunder of heels on hard wood,
Just the voice of a solitary woman - crying into the rain.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter. August 14th. 2020.