L-I-F-E, Mixed Messages OR Any Human Heart

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

Today's poem first appeared on the blogs in 2012 under the title, 'Any Human Heart'.

Now, we do not ask to be born. We are born, literally, at our parent’s pleasure.  I don’t subscribe to the view that we owe our parents anything. Where there is love between parent and child, it will reap its own rewards.  Where there is no love between parent and child, the child has absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.

Regular readers will know that I support euthanasia in certain circumstances; not, though, when a person is depressed and unable to think clearly. I tried to commit suicide many years ago in the course of a severe nervous breakdown. I am so glad I failed. At the moment, we are still in the thick of a pandemic, and I know some people are feeling desperate; my advice, for what it's worth, is hang on in there because life will get better for all of us if only eventually rather than improving the quality of our Here-and-Now as and when we would dearly prefer.

Yes, there are times we may regret being born, especially when an ever growing disparity between the world into which we would like to live and the one we are stuck with sends us hurtling into a downward spiral of despair; thankfully, the human spirit is better than that although it, too, will have its bad days nor (for good or ill) is it immune to temptation.

The workings of the human mind and spirit are complex, all the more so for the contradictory nature and sheer persistence of the human heart is search of something ... better, kinder, whatever.

Hopefully, humanity can learn from the graver mistakes made in its history rather than thinking it can rewrite it or, worse, block it out and inadvertently go on to repeat the same mistakes ...

This poem is a kenning.

L-I-F-E, MIXED MESSAGES or ANY HUMAN HEART

Running the gamut of life

and love has only brought me pain

like some fine autumn leaf

turning gold (once green) battered

by October winds and rain,

souvenir of a spring badly let down

by an unkind summer yet again,

no silvery light able to make good

Apollo’s absences

Striving for meaning in life

and love has only left me as confused

as nature by global warming

causing bird and beast to change

habit and habitat

(little if anything the better for that)

while humanity chews fat

over a thinning polar ice, dying trees

and sickly skies

Seeking to move on in life

and love has only made me realise

I kicked off as a child

from lies in a poem read aloud in class

about a God in His Heaven

so all’s right with a world struggling

to feed its children,

as if any religion could ever make good

poverty or starvation

I am that heart whose first beats at birth

are welcomed by a kinder Earth

Copyright R. N. Taber 2012, 2020