Catch Me If You Can

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

Readers keep asking about my fiction blog and when any unpublished novels there are likely to appear in print. Well, I am through with being let down by literary agents and most publishers show no interest in a writer unless he or she has one so they are unlikely to appear in book form. However, I plan to upload them to amazon as e-books at a later date and will let you all know when I do so. In the meantime, you may care to take a peek at one or two of the gay-interest and crime novels I have serialised:

https://rogertaberfiction.blogspot.com/2016/05/news-updates-fiction.html

I may not be a very successful writer in terms of sales and reputation, but I do see my wring as a huge success in so far as it has helped me combat depression and get a life. I recommend any form of creative therapy for depressives worldwide; for me, it ha been writing, especially poetry, but I know people for whom crafts, gardening, composing music and /or songwriting have played much the same part in helping to keep them mentally and emotionally fit enough to enjoy life.

Meanwhile...

I am delighted that the blog has recently acquired some readers in Australia. Here’s a BIG welcome to you all. I lived there for a short time many years ago and always intended to return, but life had other ideas. Sadly, even the least expensive travel insurance for someone with underlying health problems (in my case, high blood pressure and prostate cancer) is exorbitant so I will probably never make it now. Oh, but it’s a great country, and my personal experience of the people there is a very positive one.

Meanwhile...

Today’s poem is a kenning that last appeared on the blog in 2010 so methinks it deserves an airing. Reader ‘Glen’ shares that view and I am delighted to wish him a very Happy (70th) Birthday today! (I am not far behind you, Glen...oo-errr!!)

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

Poets have striven to catch me;
But how to capture a lark’s song
bursting on the ear with mere
simile, metaphor, rhyme…
or convey a rousing waltz in time
to the rhythm of a spring breeze
playing for the coming again
of all things bright and beautiful,
all creatures, great and small?

Painters have striven to catch me,
but how to capture the blue of a sky
on a summer’s day, or its hues
of red and gold at the sun’s setting
or at its lively reawakening us
to the jewel that is life, for all its ups
and downs, hopes lost and found,
left in pieces if never past mending
in time for a happier ending?

Musicians claim to have caught me
in an embrace of song whose beauty
must surely equal the sweet lay
of a nightingale at the closing of a day
seen all that’s best in Man and Beast,
the worst forgotten, let fade away
like blood stains in some watery sky
recalling how all is rarely (if ever?) fair
in love any more than in war

Dearer by far than all we'll ever own
is creativity's setting, not its stone

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2017

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears in A Feeling for the Quickness of Time by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2005.]