A Lion in Winter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber
Overheard:
“This pandemic, it seems to have the heart of lion. Let’s hope the vaccines are
good hunters!”
Ah, but the human spirit, too, is more than capable of lending the heart of a lion to any of us whenever we need it most; it also has a lion’s skill in avoiding capture.
A
friend who lost his wife to breast cancer a few years ago, commented at her
funeral “Of course, I’ll always miss her terribly, but love has the heart of a lion,
and that never dies. Hers is more than enough to see me through the
rest of my life... for better, for worse”
A LION IN WINTER
Find
me in a very lonely place,
its
corners dark and bare,
struggling
to ward off fears
surging
through my body,
snapping
at my mind for thoughts
tossing
me such ideas as not made to last,
leading
nowhere - fast
All
things bright and beautiful
out
of sight where windows
sparing
me no signs of life-light,
the
only shadows, my fears,
my
only company, the sounds of mice
come
to feed on what may yet be left of me
worth
saving for... eternity?
No
place else to go but here, fear
stoking
all but dead ashes,
mind-body-spirit
as keen to bury
all
traces of positive-thinking
as
needing to break free of a Black Hole
carved
out by the likes of regrets and despair
haunting
past-present-future
Suddenly,
flickers of light all around,
growing
in shape and form,
warning
I not let them out of my sight
or
risk returning to this prison,
left
blaming Fate for such human flaws
as
unable to rally lifeforces enough to restore
a
lion grown weary of winter
Slowly,
but surely, inner eye (and ear) freed again
to
rework the art of being human
Copyright R. N. Taber 2002, rev.2021
[Note:
The original version of this poem appears in my collection The Third Eye,
Assembly Books, 2004.]
Labels: despair, global consciousness, human nature, human spirit, life-forces, loneliness, love, mortality, pandemic, personal space, poetry, positive thinking, posthumous consciousness, self-awareness, stress, winter
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