Lines on the Extraordinary Nature of Ordinariness

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

I am often asked why I revise a poem already published years later. Did I not have a sense of its being incomplete at the time?  The truth is, no I didn’t. As far as expressing a sense of what I was feeling at the time, I was happy enough with the original version of the poem below when it first appeared in my collection, A Feeling for the Quickness of Time in 2005. Rightly or wrongly, I felt the feeling was worth sharing, giving readers food for thought that might even let them experience a similar sense of past-present-future as expressed in the most ordinary surroundings as I did then... 

I feel the same way now, 17 years later. as I have grown older and my feelings matured, so too has my sense of that same ordinariness, especially in so far as there is nothing ordinary about it at all. At the same time, my feeling for poetry and expression, too has matured, and I recognise this. Still wanting to share my experience with others, I find myself working on the same poem, but in a different way, choosing my words no less carefully than before, but making sense in ways that eluded me when I was writing the original version because, albeit unknowingly, I hadn’t yet reached the stage in my life when I had experienced just what it was and is I felt the need to express and share in the form of a poem.

Over to you, dear readers, and I can but hope you will enjoy the experience of time-travelling via magic of ordinariness as much as I do. 

LINES ON THE EXTRAORDINARY NATURE OF ORDINARINESS 

Clouds, magic carpet rides
to exotic places;
awakening us to a repeat
of bath time potential,
pop star, jazz player, classic musician...
bent upon making the world wake up, sit up, 
shut up and listen

 Grass, littered with daisies
sunspots of memory;
trees, waving leafy arms,
telling us off
for the many mistakes we’ve (all) made, 
never meant to happen, best forgotten, easier
said than done 

A broken fence, urging us
to revisit, repair
broken friendships, forgiving
from the heart, so...
who’ll get us off to a good start, forget rhetoric
and more besides by letting actions speak louder
louder than words? 

An old armchair, memories
of a special someone who’ll sit there
no more, words
in the air left unsaid, missed opportunities
for too often forgetting
how much we owe the living
when too late, but for in our dreams of course,
for better or worse 

Crisp, clean pillowcases
all to ourselves, nudging us to observe
a damp patch
on the ceiling, spreading, lending pictures
to half-closed eyes...
landscapes, seascapes, cloudscapes passing by,
letting sleep take over for a spot of joyriding – or
running for cover?

 Copyright R. N. Taber 2005, rev. 2021