Going To The Movies

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

My thanks go to several readers have said how much they enjoy the videos and poems that my friend Graham and I upload to my You Tube channel from time to time.

http://www.youtube.com/rogerNtaber

Hopefully, as well as enjoyment, both videos and accompanying poems might arouse sleeping senses in some viewers and get them asking questions if only to themselves about life and nature.

Today’s poem consider the subject at a deeper level than Graham and I aspire to on You Tube, but it is not irrelevant all the same.

I watched a film on TV recently about the Vietnam War; it was a fictional but very realistic take on the war and pulled no punches. The next day I overheard a group of local young people in their early teens talking about it and getting very excited about some of its more graphic action shots. A girl felt it was ‘a bit over the top’ while one of the boys pointed out that such things are only to be expected in a war. The other boy asked,’ ‘What’s all the fuss about anyway? It’s only a story. I mean, it’s not real is it? It’s not as if that sort of thing actually happens in real life...’ At this, all three shrugged their shoulders as if in agreement and started talking about football instead.

Don’t happen in real life? Do they imagine the horrors of any war are little more than the products of a vivid imagination?

Hopefully those young people will get around to thinking and asking questions about wars past and present, and what they come up with will give their dozy senses a nasty jolt... for real.

Fictional or documentary, the ability of the camera’s moving eye to draw us into its complex web of genuine sentiment and positive argument can never be underestimated.  All credit to the person behind and directing the camera, of course. 

GOING TO THE MOVIES or 

The moving picture speaks,
and having spoken moves on
to haunt the creative mind,
play with words on the tongue
that may (or may not) paint
pictures of thought others may
(or may not) be invited to see,
interpret as we (or they) intend,
only to subtly, discreetly, let it drop
in a history bin

The moving picture captures
and having captured demands
its captives consider if we’re
but slaves to its fictions or privy
to what goes on in those murky
corners of reality we are all free
to access any time but prefer
someone else take a closer look,
and clean it up without too much ado
about nothing

The moving picture speaks
and having spoken moves in
on the senses if only to see
what (if any) effect on emotions
kept under wraps for fear
we betray aspects of selfhood
that may be misconstrued
as weaknesses where we’d rather
wear our strengths on sleeves frayed
at the edges

Compelled to join forces once
a moving picture has said its piece
and moved on, inner sight 
asking of the inner ear what it has seen,
agreeing they feel uneasy 
for having been given a taste 
of untouchables cast out 
by croc tears and canned laughter...
Oh, but let's just call it entertainment
and forget all about it?
  
Copyright R. N. Taber 2012