It is so
easy to blame everything and everyone for our sense of unfairness whenever life
goes sour on us. Taking responsibility for our own lives can be something of an
epiphany.
Some readers
may be interested to know that I read this poem among others on the 4th
plinth in Trafalgar Square back in 2009 as my contribution to Antony Gormley’s ‘live
sculpture’ project One and Other. (It
lasts an hour.) During that summer, 2400 people from all walks of life performed
their ‘own thing’ on the plinth 24/7 for 100 days; the entire web stream is now
archived in the British Library.
Enjoy!
OPEN ROAD
Found
myself one day
on a road
I did not know;
kept
walking anyway,
no place
else to go
Past
fields once green,
houses an
ugly, silent grey;
landscape
obscene,
ash on
the clay
Bend
after bend, afraid
of all I
knew I’d surely find,
down to
land mines laid
of the
political kind
Sick of
unholy collusion
contrived
daily for His glory
(no
matter our religion)
God, but
history
So, no
sign of salvation
or even a
lifeline in prayer;
any hope
of redemption
reduced
to metaphor
Suddenly,
I began to see
as if in
a fog starting to clear,
it wasn’t
the road but me
going
nowhere
Woken
from a nightmare,
I was
just in time to discover
Apollo
tugging at one ear,
a fool at
the other
Sunlight,
an open road,
from
bedlam took me away
as I
walked unafraid
into a
new day
[From: Accomplices To Illusion by R. N. Taber, 2007]
Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment