A Poet's Blog: Roger N.Taber shares his thoughts & poems...

Thoughts and observations by English poet Roger N. Taber, a retired librarian and poet-novelist.- "Ethnicity, Religion, Gender, Sexuality ... these are but parts of a whole. It is the whole that counts." RNT [NB While I have no wish to create a social network, I will always reply to critical emails about my poetry. Contact: rogertab@aol.com].

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Location: London, United Kingdom

Sadly, a bad fall in 2012 has left me with a mobility problem, and being diagnosed with prostate cancer the same year hasn't helped, but I get out and about with my trusty walking stick as much as I can, take each day as it comes and try to keep looking on the bright(er) side of life. Many of my poems reflect the need to nurture a positive-thinking mindset whatever life throws at us.

Thursday, 20 August 2020

Engaging with Epic Poetry

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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