Scenes from a Life

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

Today's poem  first appeared on the blog in 2012. Yes, I know I said I would only be writing up the blogs now and then while I am compiling a new collection, but I guess I can't keep away and several readers have emailed to say logging on to the blog helps them get their thoughts together, ready for whatever the day ahead may bring. My own thoughts are all over the place these days, and the new collection is proving harder that I anticipated, so continuing to write up the blogs does us both a favour. wry bardic grin

For many of us, our thoughts will be with the people of Reading today, and the savage attack by an   individual over the weekend resulting in three people, simply enjoying time in the sun with friends in a local park, losing their lives in what police are now saying appears to have been a terrorist-motivated attack. 

The death of a friend or loved-one is hard enough to bear, without its coming so unexpectedly and violently and our hearts go out to all those close to those who died and were injured in the attack, also anyone who witnessed, for whom it will always count among their darkest and most frightening memories. 

Love, though, never dies and will remain a source of comfort and inspiration all our lives; nor is that just the rhetoric of poetry, either, as I speak from personal experience.

Now, I don’t always want to talk to people when I am travelling. More often than not, I like to enjoy the scenery or just close my eyes and go wherever my thoughts take me. For example, take the London to Brighton train that I've caught on average several times a year for 50+ years; by the time the train arrives in Brighton or back in London, I'll have travelled the world over, and loved every minute of it. Having been all but housebound during the Covid-19 pandemic, I have travelled the world in mind-body-spirit, and to say it has helped me to stay hopeful and keep looking on the bright(er) side of life would be a gross understatement.

That’s life for you, mind over matter, and who’s to say mortality is so different?

Yes, people have had a free ticket to ride since the beginning of time when the only train to ride was the Imagination Express ...

SCENES FROM A LIFE 

Passing into spring,

pausing where streams of living water flow

and kingfishers reassure me

they know I am here,

whenever they can but catch glimpses of me 

beneath leafy skies

Rushing into summer,

pausing where living woodlands in full voice

sings songs of my childhood

as if to reassure me

it still has hold of my shirt collar

and will never let go

Rolling into autumn,

pausing where the last flowers still blooming

inspire the weariest traveller

with a passion for life;

better to have got away than settled

for armchair histrionics

Rumbling into winter,

anticipating the last long tunnel discouraging

us from entering, though nature

falling back on old tricks,

working new wonders at every turn

where we look for them

Copyright R N. Taber 2012