All Hallows Eve.

Struggling light. Twilight dissolves the day

Deep into mists of memory.

I watch the sunset darkening the garden,

Draining the autumnal colours of that vivacity

Death lends to the edge of life.

A black wall denser than the darkest night

Descends, separating the mild months from old

                                                                 winter

With an almost fatal finality.

We cannot step back through the wall to summer,

Time is a one way ticket however hard we argue.

The leaves are beginning to drop, cover the asphalt

                                                                      path

With a moist carpet slippery as ice floes,

Next April almost implied by their transient beauty.

Beneath the fallen leaves a pile of surgical masks,

Used once, then quietly dumped without due care

By families walking to and from the school.

Their pale blue makes me fear the sky may fall.

I will never stoop to clear away these masks,

They reference undisclosed infections

Known only to the people who have worn them.

I open the front door, it is time to re-enter the house.

My supper is already cooked, I have only to reheat it.

I wipe my feet on the mat, but keep on my surgical mask

Before I know for certain I am alone.

In the quiet of the evening I imagine footsteps behind me.

Friend or foe? - Neighbour or would be thief?

The street lights flick on suddenly their silver tinted dawn.

My shadow glides before me into the hall.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

October 27th. - 28th. 2021.

I have always found the few days at the end of October and the beginning of November to be wierdly claustrophobic. A time shadowed by regrets.

Trevor J Potter's Art: Pauline. (Revised Poem).

Trevor J Potter's Art: Pauline. (Revised Poem).: Grief lasts for a lifetime. After fifty two years I am still grieving for you. When I saw your self portrait made from stained glass I...

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Trevor J Potter's Art: Family Photographs..: These photographs are merely cheap paper icons, Mementoes to hang up on a wall,  display in a book. Mementoes that fade in a decade or tw...

Pauline Remembered. (Revised).

I will show you the photographs

But they can only give you a false impression.

Pre-digital cameras were not able to reveal

The delicate patterns flicked over her flawless skin

When winter sunlight filtered through high windows

And woke us from deep sleep.

The small hints of a mood change in her thoughtful eyes

Could perhaps be replicated by an artist

On canvas or on paper,

But the cameras that we used in the nineteen sixties

Were far too clumsy, the shutters far too slow

To register such delicate shifts in mood,

The sudden laughter and smiles - followed by a kiss.

Therefore these photographs can only hint at

The love that was so private, so much of who we were

In those two short years that we spent together -

Before she died of cancer - aged just twenty eight.

But I still recall the tenderness of her fingers

Stroking my face and fidgeting my hair

When I bent forward to kiss her on the shoulder

With that shy tenderness only young folk show.

And sometimes I can almost touch her in the dark

As though she were alive in the room beside me

In the quiet moments before I fall asleep. -

That is only wishful thinking, I try to tell myself,

But sometimes her voice seems closer than my heartbeats.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

February 21st. - 22nd. 2019. - October 19th. 2021.

Although we knew each other for nine years, it was only during the last two or three years of her life that we drew close together.

Recalling Two Artists, Pauline and Sharon.

Broken shards of porcelain litter 

The back lots of my life.

Two loves I thought would last a lifetime

Lost to ruthless history.

Two flawless porcelain figurines

Smashed in the yard at the furnace door.

Even the photographs I am left with

Fading on the kitchen wall.

Memories disintegrate into shadow,

Become unreal, detached from life,

Become like scattered porcelain shards

Too wrecked to be fixed back together.

And friends who die, have died forever,

We cannot recall them - with love - with tears.

Trevor John Karsavin Potter.

14th. October 2021.

Trevor J Potter's Art: My Home Is Europe. (ReWritten Poem)

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Trevor J Potter's Art: My Home Is Europe. (New Poem)

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