Open Road

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

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 4^th 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.

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20100223121732/oneandother.co.uk/participants/Roger_T [For now, at least, this link needs the latest Adobe Flash Player  and works best in Firefox; the archives website cannot run Flash but changes scheduled for later this year may well mean the link will open without it. Ignore any error message and give it a minute or so to start up. The video lasts an hour. ] RT 3/18

OPEN ROAD

Found myself one day

on a road I did not know;

kept walking anyway,

for no place else to go

Past fields once green,

houses an ugly, silent grey;

landscape obscene,

as if ash on the clay

Bend after bend, afraid

of all I knew I’d surely find,

down to landmines laid

of the socio-political kind

Sick of unholy collusion

contrived daily for His glory

(no matter our religion)

God, but pawn of history

So, no sign of salvation

or even a lifeline in prayer,

any hope of redemption

reduced to mere metaphor

Suddenly, I began to see

as if in a fog starting to clear,

it wasn’t the road but me

lost my way, going nowhere

Woken from a nightmare,

I was just in time to discover

home truths at one ear,

alter ego nagging the other

Sunlight, an open road,

from my folly took me away

as I walked unafraid

and briskly, into a new day

Copyright R. N. Taber 2007, 2018

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears in Accomplices To Illusion by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2007]