Outlook Changeable OR Engaging with Contemporaneity

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

As we enter the first phase of emerging from lockdown restrictions imposed on us by the C-19 coronavirus, many if not most of us remain nervous if not sceptical as to whether or not it may be too soon. At the same time, neither people’s frayed nerves nor the national economy can stay the same for much longer without the threat of freefall looming even larger.

Some people suspect the high death toll here and around the world has been under reported. I wouldn’t know, but wouldn’t be surprised as under reporting has long been a way of keeping the proverbial lid on things and preventing the kind of overspill on to the streets that we are seeing across the U.S. as a consequence of the social consequences of the coronavirus and the high profile death of George Floyd, an unarmed black American, while being restrained by police in Minnesota.

The media is often accused of exaggerating, even exploiting world news; that may well be true sometimes, but I suspect information fed to the media by various governments around the world is invariably less than the whole truth. An old truism springs to mind in so far as you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time …

Among the harsher realities and responsibilities with which human nature has little or no choice but to engage is that posed by everyday life; a challenge at any level, one in which we invariably take varying degrees of pleasure as well as pain. Whatever  'nothing ventured, nothing gained' and we can either rise to the challenge and engage with it as best we can or forget any prospect of progressing to better times. 

For better, for worse, we will almost certainly be judged by any choices we make, but it is always worth remembering that, whatever the consequences of our actions for others, only the individual is answerable to his or her own conscience, no one else; living with conscience is yet another of human nature's harsher realities and responsibilities - arguably the toughest - with which we have no choice but to engage as best we can.

  

OUTLOOK, CHANGEABLE or ENGAGING WITH CONTEMPORANEITY

Dreamy, smoky old town,

draped in a pretty, oily twilight

between showers;

among its glistening spires,

a tolling bell openly conspiring

to wake the dead

Memories, a blur in each

woolly head desperately seeking

clarity of sorts;

gay kisses, easy target

for snipers dipping poison darts,

into the bloodstream

World, invariably dragging

on bony feet like fear scared stiff

of its own shadow;

latest storm, all but passed;

nature, keen to prove its capacity

for regeneration

Civilization, under-reporting 

the cost of resting on certain laurels, 

if only to credit

its potential, at least as good

as it ever was, nor its outlook any 

less changeable

Copyright R. N. Taber 2002, rev. 2020

[Note: This poem has been slightly but significantly revised - and an alternative title added - from an earlier version posted on the blog some years ago and which also appears under the title ‘Outlook Changeable’ in First Person Plural by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2002.]