Autumn, Season of Silences

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

Today’s poem first appeared on the blog in 2013.

When barely spring here in the UK, it is already autumn in some parts of the world. An Australian reader living and working in London one spring and ‘feeling homesick’ once asked for an autumn poem. [I lived in Australia once, a long time ago, and would love to go back as fate had it in for me at the time and I wasn't able to stay long. Sadly, travel insurance due to my prostate cancer and other health issues is prohibitive so I suspect I never will.]

There is a dreamy quality about autumn that, for me, is like listening to unspoken poems, a spirited silence that no other season can quite match, even a feisty spring or gregarious summer, as if it is loath to go into a winter sleep likely to subdue its silence if not its spirit ...

AUTUMN, SEASON OF SILENCES 

One long, lovely summer

once I spent with you

till fallen angels broke cover;

enter autumn, on cue

Our time together near over,

we were as leaves

on a grieving sycamore

falling like tears

Drifting, piling on a grave

of broken promises,

all the love we’ll never have

for all our kisses

Saddest of autumn dreams,

unspoken poems

Copyright R. N. Taber 2004; 2020

[Note: This poem was first published in an anthology, Shades of Autumn, Anchor Books [Forward Press] 2004 and subsequently in A Feeling for the Quickness of Time by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2005]

S-E-L-F, Living with the Enemy

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

Now and then we find ourselves confronting aspects of our past we would prefer to forget, especially any that may have caused distress - however unintentionally - to others.

Years ago, when I was a psychological mess and desperate for some time to think it through and work out a positive sense of direction for myself, I fled to Australia on the Assisted Passage scheme; in so far as any hopes that things would be different, even better, there, I might well have thought myself to be on yet another losing streak. For me, though, the redeeming feature of a venture doomed to failure from the start - not least because of the person I was then – was my meeting up with an old aborigine to whom – for the first time ever – I found myself able to confide my worst fears; I unleashed a string of regrets I had never quite faced head-on, probably because I was too busy blaming them for my state of mind.

He listened. He said very little, but listened. When I finally shut up, we sat in a very comfortable silence for some time until he said, “Regrets are part of life. If they come to haunt us, it’s but to teach us. Whether or not we learn anything, well, that is down to us, no one else.” It was such an obvious comment, yet made more sense than anything had made sense to me for years. (I was 24 years-old.) I could hear my old English teacher, ‘Jock’ Rankin, telling me much the same thing, and wished I had taken on the implications more, but does anyone in their teens?

Regular readers will know that thanks to my aboriginal friend, I flew home a few weeks later, hopefully a better person, definitely a changed one, and more importantly willing to learn from my ghosts instead of hating - and all but giving up on - the part of me that gave rise to them in the first place; a part that is still there, of course, but still learning, and hurting the less so for that.

S-E-L-F, LIVING WITH THE ENEMY

Regret is never enough

for the graver wrongs we do

as sure to haunt us

by day and night, ghosts

of an alter ego we got to know,

learned to hate, and finally cast aside

long, long, ago

Regret is never enough

to compensate for any mistakes

baying at our heels

like wolves, ready to pounce,

do their worst, gnaw to the bone

a body deserving no less for caving in

to being human

Regret is never enough,

cannot ever (quite) make amend

for any hurt caused,

by promises broken, trust betrayed,

a dark side of Everyman seeing to plans

haphazardly laid

Regret, for any impulses

of the worst kind, mind-body-spirit

long since redefined

by such confessions as no one hears,

meant only for the inner ear, and no one

to dry its tears

Regret, enemy-friend nobody wants know,

teaching us, ourselves, to know

Copyright R. N. Taber 2019

Note: Frequently, and as recently as only yesterday, a reader complains that I rarely insert full stops at the end of stanzas. I offer no apologies. For me, full stops mark an ending, and a poem has none; it does not even have meaning (for the reader) until he or she starts to take in whatever is meaningful about the poem for them. and thinks on…