Paradise On Hold

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Like many of my poems, Paradise On Hold has also appeared in an anthology; in this case, This Is Our Moment, Poetry Now (Forward Press), 2000. It was also included in the May 2006 issue of Ygdrasil: Journal of the Poetic Arts that featured a selection of my poems. I am posting it today especially for ‘Susan from Birmingham’ and ‘Greg from San Francisco’ who emailed me to say I am getting ‘too political’ and would I please post another of my nature poems. I was delighted to receive several complimentary emails after it first appeared here on the blog back in June 2008. [Oh, but it seems like only yesterday! Where does the time go eh?]

Meanwhile, I continue to experience in my relationship with nature, an ever growing sense of peace and love I never found in religion, supporting my personal view that religion has no monopoly on spirituality.

Yes, nature can be harsh but so, too, can religion, not least in its various dogma which must bear no small share of responsibility for a divided world.

PARADISE ON HOLD

Let spring drift
into summer, its greens turn
red and gold;
let poets make of seasons
all they find;
it's Nature rules, and even poets
grow cold whenever  winter calls
on lonely hills

Soon, daffodils,
in their turn, and ours, too,
if the way of things
running true. Who knows?
For each flower
let grow, its seasons come
and go where human nurture
of a mind to follow

Yet, for each seed
blowing in the wind, a threat
to all its kind...
Let the world wreak its worst,
the good earth
will do its best, though
it share or kills in the light
of human ills

In life, in death, let there
be flowers...

Copyright R. N. Taber 2001, 2010

[Note: An earlier version of this poems appears in the aforementioned publications and in Love and Human Remains by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2000]