By John RC Potter
You always seem to wear it so well
this little thing we like to call love;
it makes the early dawn shine with light:
you reclaim the morning after night.
You have a peace that is deep inside,
born of love lost and hope betrayed;
all can see love’s looking good on you:
they plunge into those eyes of such blue.
I can say the others weren’t all that bad,
but they just weren’t all that good for me;
we often lose ourselves in someone’s eyes:
a dream shines brightest just before it dies.
We wait for love to wrap itself all around us,
without finding the love that is found within;
others have become lost in these eyes of blue:
even when it’s bad, love’s looking good on you.
John RC Potter is an international educator from Canada, living in Istanbul. He has experienced a revolution (Indonesia), air strikes (Israel), earthquakes (Turkey), boredom (UAE), and blinding snow blizzards (Canada), the last being the subject of his story, “Snowbound in the House of God” (Memoirist, May 2023). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have been published in a range of magazines and journals, most recently in Blank Spaces, (“In Search of Alice Munro”, June 2023), Literary Yard (“She Got What She Deserved”, June 2023), Freedom Fiction (“The Mystery of the Dead-as-a-Doornail Author”, July 2023), The Serulian (“The Memory Box”, September 2023) & The Montreal Review “(“Letter from Istanbul”, November 2023). His story, “Ruth’s World” (Fiction on the Web, March 2023) has recently been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize.
Hot Pot Magazine 