http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber
Today’s poem first appeared on
the blog in 2017.
In July 2009 I was privileged to participate in "One and Other", sculptor Sir Antony Gormley's 'live sculpture' project on the 4th plinth in London's Trafalgar Square; I gave a poetry reading. At the time, I thought reference to its being a 'live' sculpture simply referred to those participants invited to do whatever for an hour, July- October. I became aware that I was part of an epic poem of sorts, which subsequently inspired the poem.
Now, text-speak
may well be as relatively a new phenomenon as the mobile phone itself, but
conversations with the inner self are as old as humankind.
Invariably, we think of mind, body and spirit at separate entities, and I am often criticised for suggesting they are. Yet, each engage with each other in such a way that maybe it is high time we started
thinking of the whole rather than the parts? After all, it is they that would
see us (as a whole) engage with time and space... for better, for worse; it is they, also, to, whom we invariably turn when we are stressed out for whatever reason.
Exercising mind and body is a form of creative therapy that can encourage the human spirit to wake up to whatever reality we are avoiding and help us reach a constructive decision as to how best to proceed - or not, as the case may be.
Poets make much of Poetry of the Heart, but there is a sense in which we are all, each and every one of us, living poems; the whole of us, as individuals, not just this part or that.
There are many who profess to hate poetry, find it glib, trite, weak; those same people, simply by engaging with life itself, who are creating the Poetry of History, an epic poem about the human race as beautiful - not least for its very diversity - as any prose.
ENGAGING WITH EPIC POETRY
Life,
spiralling
me downwards
from
cradle to grave…
often
when I least expect it,
leaves
me clinging
for
dear life at straws in an ill wind
raised
by a helter-skelter
of
events conspiring to drag me
beyond
imagination,
test
ego (and salvation) to limits
rarely
conceived
even
by those daily enduring
a world
of nightmares
Love,
spelling
out such promises
as
sweet dreams
are
made of, offering (for free)
a
magical-mystery-tour
of
mind-body-spirit asking only
that
I stay true
to
the end of a line drawn
not
(whimsically)
in
sand or clay, but in good faith
that
1 + 1 is equal,
to
the sum of all its frictions,
and, yes, I can add up
Hope,
bringing
me the best of things
at
the worst of times,
reshaping the obstinate clay
of
human nature
as a
potter’s wheel might
its
tasks in hand,
demanding
the poetry of art
speak
up for Beauty,
fair
chameleon exposing masks
of
the Beast
for
human waste washed up
by
the tides of life
Centuries of anticipating eternity
for
engaging with its epic poetry
Copyright R. N. Taber 2017
[Note: This poem also appears on my gay-interest blog today.] RT
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