Home for Christmas

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

Today's entry is from my gay-interest poetry blog archives for December 2015.

As you will all know by now I am not a Christmassy person, but no spoilsport either and will always wish everyone a very Happy Christmas/ New Year, and mean it. 

As a pantheist, I don't celebrate Christmas in any religious sense. As a poet with a strong sense of spirituality - that I take from nature - I enjoy taking stock of my life at this time of year, counting my blessings and glossing over numerous flaws in the status quo.

On Christmas Day, I like to be on my own (yes, really!) strolling down Memory Lane and re-living the GOOD times while allowing myself time to be sad for the bad times. I like to remember those I have loved and lost, again dwelling on happy times together while not attempting to stem any tears.

If I spend Christmas with anyone, I feel obliged to make an effort rather than quietly surrender to any feelings of sadness and let them pass of their own accord.  I am not a sad person. On the contrary, I am a very positive thinking, lively guy. No one, though, can be positive thinking and lively all the time so when I feel sad, I let myself BE sad, and the sadness quickly passes, invariably replaced by happy memories to which the positive thinking, lively, part of me can more easily relate and build upon. Christmas brings many sad memories rushing back; I need to let them rush past me so I can enjoy the many happy memories I have shared with those I may have loved and lost but who sustain me still. 

We hear about families and friends getting back together for Christmas...but poles apart again by New year's Day. Let us never forget that love is not (and never has been) just for Christmas or any other religious festival where it needs to make an appearance. Any love worth having is worth saving, even if that means having to agree to differ with loved ones and accepting that our differences don't make us different, just human...

New Year? Well that's a different story altogether, celebrating a whole twelve months ahead to enjoy with friends and rediscover the true meanings of peace, love, and joie de vivre...

HOME FOR CHRISTMAS 

I’d hear talk of Christmas,
and my heart would sink for memories
of so many lonely Christmases
since love walked out of my life and family
never understood

I’d hear carols at Christmas,
and my heart would skip a beat or two
for recalling happy Christmases
when love took centre-stage in my life,
nothing else mattered

Friends planning for Christmas,
with smiles on their faces for all the fun
of such joyous Christmases
as once I had, and never (quite) abandoned
by fate, chance, love…

Christmas Eve, everyone rushing
for last minute buys, and then back home,
ever hopeful of Christmas
fulfilling its promises of peace and goodwill
around a festive table

Me, I hear talk of Christmas,
and my heart leaps  just for remembering
our conspiring with Christmas,
we total strangers, one starry Christmas Eve
of rediscovering love

Copyright R. N. Taber 2015

Sea Change

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

Summer is fast ebbing away and a potpourri of autumn scents are in the air already, assailing the senses and changing the inner eye’s kaleidoscopic view of self, nature and the world…yet again.

Autumn is a beautiful season with its turning leaves of red and gold, yet sad also as we bid farewell to the swallows and prepare - along with much of nature - for the winter months ahead. At the same time, there is something beautiful, too, in sadness as if human spirit and spirit of nature are always conspiring to somehow soften the sharper edge of grief, loneliness, apprehension,…whatever, and never more so than in autumn.

This poem is a villanelle; it first appeared s in a Poetry Now [Forward Press] anthology A Summer’s Breeze (2003) and subsequently in my collection.

SEA CHANGE

Sea of muddy leaves,

our summer gone

as autumn grieves

Heaps, like ragged graves

with flowers strewn,

sea of muddy leaves

A dying sparrow heaves

its last, alone

as autumn grieves

North wind brings waves,

our seasons blown;

sea of muddy leaves

No kinder soul than braves

an acid rain

as autumn grieves

Each heart, in time, gives

up its own…

sea of muddy leaves

as autumn grieves

Copyright R. N. Taber 2003

[From: The Third Eye by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2004: new (e-edition) in preparation.]