Setting the Pace

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

Here is another poem from my collections that is not on the blog; as I continue to work through them, adding revised poems for e-editions to publish at a later date, there may well be others appearing here. (Poems already on my poetry blogs have long since been revised where appropriate.)

It often seems to me that we live in an increasingly heartless world, one in which people don't care enough about each other as befits a common humanity. Even so, despite the hypocrisy, bigotry, fake news and other divisive aspects of human nature, its humanity continues to shine through because most people DO care; it's just that few hit the headlines, and we are invariably  influenced by media headlines - local and national -more than we might care to admit.

It is the human heart's capacity for empathy and caring that will always let mind-body-spirit have the edge on the worst aspects of human nature...as and when we choose to let it; in any socio-cultural-religious context.

SETTING THE PACE

I am a cry in the night,

world cocking but half an ear

as it tosses and turns

its sleepy heads on damp pillows

that will need laundering

come morning if only to hide

tell-tale patches of grief,

guilt, betrayal, loss of innocence

and worse

I am tears in the rain,

no one able to tell I am crying,

no matter that I am

dying inside, needing to show

a kinder side than seen

by those who have no pity

for the likes of a cry

in the night or tears in the rain

soon forgotten

I am shadows in twilight,

precursor to darker deeds than

any God imagined

or else He (or She) would never

have laid life on me

but left me to pass like a dream

across time and space,

no cries or tears or fretting

about losing face

The faster beat of the human heart,

I give its humanity a head start

Copyright R. N. Taber 2010

[Note: This poem appears in Tracking the Torchbearer by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2012.]