Sometimes,
we can be walking along without a care in the world, and then we spot
something, as often as not quite trivial, that triggers a chain reaction taking us to places we would have much preferred to avoid…and once there, struggle to find our way back again.
It is true to say that time's footprints are sometimes those of hobnail boots, all but obliterating any prints that have gone before although, as an open heart is to bigotry, so humanity is to inhumanity, and all the more capable of regeneration.
H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, TIME'S FOOTPRINTS
Scraps of
a letter floating down a gutter,
pricking the
occasional comfort zone
Wondering
about blue ink stains, inwardly
debating
the when, whose, and why
Doesn’t
matter, of course, all history now,
heading
in pieces for the nearest drain
Yet,
someone had once made time to write,
feel,
read (send?) decide to throw away
Secrets
passing between lovers found out,
and
punished, disowned…ever forgiven?
Friends,
family, stranded on opposite sides
of some socio-cultural-religious
divide?
Had
someone discovered, betrayed, turned
finer
feelings into anonymous ink stains?
Tearful,
over scraps of a letter, potentially
sucking the
life out of any one of us
Bad memories
eagerly mowed down by rolls
of
thunder, over anxious to leave no trace
Rain!
Gutter, a river, scraps gone to sewage
under a
city that stinks of rotten secrets
[Note: An
earlier version of this poem appears in Accomplices To Illusion by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2007]
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