http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber
The first
poem on today’s blog was duplicated on my gay-interest blog at the request
of a young man living in Europe and afraid for many friends back home in his
native Uganda who live in constant fear or persecution, prison and worse. I may well have expressed his fears better in other poems, but this is the one he chose
because, as he puts it so succinctly, 'Everyone has a right to love, no
exceptions...'
Gay
Rights have come a long way in the West since I was young, but we still have a
long way to go before everyone achieves sufficient maturity and sense of fair
play to recognise that we are just ordinary people with a positive a
contribution to make to contemporary society as anyone else. [Religious
fundamentalists and intrinsically homophobic clerics please take note...and
grow up!] Uganda, of course, is just one of many African countries where
the repression of and attacks on gay people are a public disgrace to
humanity. What makes it all so much worse is that this attitude is
encouraged and promoted by radical evangelicals who claim to speak for God.
Well, that just goes to show how dangerous ignorance can be since the New
Testament and Holy writings associated with other religions assure us that God
is Love and love does not discriminate in this way, certainly Jesus of Nazareth
never would. I may be non-religious, but I feel very strongly that the way some
'middle management' religious leaders take it upon themselves to misinterpret
central aspects of religion for their own bigoted ends.
Here's
looking forward to the day when gay people around the world are free to express
their sexuality without fear of persecution from the less enlightened among the
heterosexual majority; a time when Human Rights for everyone are respected over and above political in-fighting and expediency.
This poem is a villanelle.
MIND-BODY-SPIRIT, ANTHOLOGY OF HUMAN NATURE
Written
in blood, centuries before,
passing
for a treatise on peace,
an
anthology on the Poetry of War
Where
warmongers strut cocksure,
find
hope’s desperate pleas,
written
in blood, centuries before
Eyes on
glory at victory’s glass door,
politicians
deliver fine speeches,
an
anthology on the Poetry of War
Pride
spilling over on the home shore
for
defeating its enemies,
written
in blood, centuries before
Love,
waiting in the wings evermore
can but
weep at brave eulogies,
an
anthology on the Poetry of War
Generations
marking its pages as sure
as next
autumn’s leaves;
an
anthology on the Poetry of War,
written
in blood, centuries before
[Note: This poem appears under the title 'Anthology inSearch of a Title' in
Tracking the Torchbearer by R. N. Taber,
Assembly Books, 2012]
Now, freedom has meant and will always mean different things to different people at different times in history, but is and will always be worth fighting for... although we should never assume that
any means justifies the end.
AT FREEDOM’S CALL
Once I played among green hills in summer,
listening to songbirds, watching them fly,
running free, hand in hand with my gay lover
our dream, like a kite, reaching for the sky
In purple hills, come autumn’s reds and gold,
I saw birds winging free of winter’s threat,
leaves painting pictures of we two grown old,
our dream, like a kite, playing hard to get
Once I walked in white hills at winter’s call,
heard a robin sing in a tree stripped bare,
nor did it flinch or fly off at the first snowfall,
our dream, like a kite, returning us there
If summer short, autumn brief, winter dead,
be love’s eternal spring taken as read
[From:
Accomplices to Illusion by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2007]
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