Love, Testament to Life OR Au Revoir, Mon Amour
There will be no blog entries for a week or so after today while I make time to start preparing a new collection; it is now ten years since Tracking the Torchbearer appeared under my own imprint. (Oh, and, yes, they did sell well and I even made a profit albeit a small one.) I also need to start work on new editions of earlier collections as a number of poems have since been revised, often only slightly, but always significantly. Only one (U.S.) publisher has expressed any interest so far, but messed me about so much that I withdrew my submission; others did not want to include gay-interest as well as general poems, and I will not compromise on this. Being gay is an integral part of who I am, but it is only a part, and we are all the sum of our parts. I may not publish print editions again, though, but upload as e-books, but time enough to cross that bridge as and when I come to it. Hopefully, some of you will enjoy exploring the blog archives in my absence.
I will try and post a new (or revised) poem from time to time, although, like so many people around the world - not least those of us who live alone - I have to confess to lockdown fatigue at the moment. As I suspect I had the milder version of Covid-19 back in early January, and count myself fortunate, everything I do still seems to be taking much longer.
Take care, folks, and many thanks - as always - for the pleasure of your company.
Meanwhile ...
Today's poem first appeared on the blog in 2016. At the time, a reader who had been browsing blog entries and emailed to ask why on earth I should think anyone reading a general poetry blog would be interested in a gay relationship. Fair enough, except that poetry is about human nature as well as the natural world; most of my gay-interest poems only appear on my gay-interest blog, but I happen to think the occasional entry here is not as inappropriate as ttis reader plainly thinks. Like it or not, there are many LGBT men and women in the world, and we are no less human (or naturally so) for that. Why must so many people rush to judgement on others, a judgement often based on shallow stereotypes? Being gay is an important part of a gay persons' whole identity, but it is only a part; what about those other parts that make us who we are?As for why I publish the poem here, I guess I live in hope that stereotypical and bigoted attitudes will eventually bee seen as fake news; there are many gay-friendly straight people out there who don't have a problem with a person's sexuality because it is the whole person they are happy to call a friend. Besides, there is nothing wrong or unusual (or immoral) about the ages-old principle of agreeing to differ ... is there?
Labels: consciousness, culture, death, diversity, global, history, human, identity, mortality, nature, personal, poetry, positive, posthumous, religion, remembrance, society, space, spirit, thinking
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