http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber
As we enter the first phase of emerging from lockdown restrictions
imposed on us by the C-19 coronavirus, many if not most of us remain nervous if
not sceptical as to whether or not it may be too soon. At the same time,
neither people’s frayed nerves nor the national economy can stay the same for
much longer without the threat of freefall looming even larger.
Some people suspect the high death toll here and around the world
has been under reported. I wouldn’t know, but wouldn’t be surprised as under reporting
has long been a way of keeping the proverbial lid on things and preventing the
kind of overspill on to the streets that we are seeing across the U.S. as a
consequence of the social consequences of the coronavirus and
the high profile death of George Floyd, an unarmed black American, while being restrained by police in Minnesota.
The media is often accused of exaggerating, even exploiting world news; that may
well be true sometimes, but I suspect information fed to the media by various governments
around the world is invariably less than the whole truth. An old truism springs
to mind in so far as you can fool some of the people some of the time,
but you can’t fool all the people all the time …
Among the harsher realities and responsibilities with which human nature has little or no choice but to engage is that posed by everyday life; a challenge at any level, one in which we invariably take varying degrees of pleasure as well as pain. Whatever 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' and we can either rise to the challenge and engage with it as best we can or forget any prospect of progressing to better times.
For better, for worse, we will almost certainly be judged by any choices we make, but it is always worth remembering that, whatever the consequences of our actions for others, only the individual is answerable to his or her own conscience, no one else; living with conscience is yet another of human nature's harsher realities and responsibilities - arguably the toughest - with which we have no choice but to engage as best we can.
OUTLOOK, CHANGEABLE or ENGAGING WITH
CONTEMPORANEITY
Dreamy, smoky old town,
draped in a pretty, oily twilight
between showers;
among its glistening spires,
a tolling bell openly conspiring
to wake the dead
Memories, a blur in each
woolly head desperately seeking
clarity of sorts;
gay kisses, easy target
for snipers dipping poison darts,
into the bloodstream
World, invariably dragging
on bony feet like fear scared stiff
of its own shadow;
latest storm, all but passed;
nature, keen to prove its capacity
for regeneration
Civilization, under-reporting
the cost of resting on certain laurels,
if only to credit
its potential, at least as good
as it ever was, nor its outlook any
less changeable
Copyright R. N. Taber 2002, rev. 2020
[Note: This poem has been slightly but significantly revised - and
an alternative title added - from an earlier version posted on the blog some
years ago and which also appears under the title ‘Outlook Changeable’ in First
Person Plural by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2002.]