Blue Remembered Hills

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

To the reader who asked how I managed to get an entry on wikipedia as he is a writer and wants one too, I honestly have no idea. A friend emailed me a few years ago to say that she had discovered it while browsing. I occasionally update it myself to include later publications as the original entry only included those up to The Third Eye (2004).

Meanwhile…

I dare say few among us have no regrets where love, even life, has not turned out quite how we’d hoped…

How many of us, too, have poised on the brink of a second chance and let something or someone get in the way of making the right decision…?

More than once in my life I have let nature decide for me although it has sometimes taken years before I understood just how precariously I was placed at the time or how Earth Mother saved me from the ultimate abyss, even if it meant I had to descend a good way down before discovering light enough in me to fight the darkness threatening to overwhelm me.

'Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.'  - A. E. Housman (from A Shropshire Lad)

BLUE REMEMBERED HILLS

I saw blue hills clash with clouds,
a gentle rain sweeping down
on where I stood, a misty haze
like memories rushing in
where angels dread in this head,
this heart, this soul, drenching
the spirit with regrets thought long
since withstood, now exposing
those half-lies we told, rushing in
on us threefold, tearing the veil
of deceit we wove with contempt,
no home truth exempt, shown up
for what we are, less than we were,
even in the womb, our fate left
to chance though joined even then
by mists sweeping out of Eden

O, for a gentle rain now where blue
remembered hills clashing with
clouds to bring thunder, lightning,
frightening us with angry faces
descending with spears to make good
(fat chance) the lives we took
when first we chose to lead them
a rare dance across hill, vale,
town and country, hiding out in a city
rather than submit, admit they
were right, we were wrong, love’s
sweet confusion but illusion,
forced in the end to part with words
that sweep down upon me now
where I wait for a clashing of clouds
and rising tide of memory to abate

Earth Mother, poised to set me free...
(or maybe too late for that already?)

Copyright R. N. Taber 2004

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears in The Third Eye by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2004.]