A Poet's Blog: Roger N.Taber shares his thoughts & poems...

Thoughts and observations by English poet Roger N. Taber, a retired librarian and poet-novelist.- "Ethnicity, Religion, Gender, Sexuality ... these are but parts of a whole. It is the whole that counts." RNT [NB While I have no wish to create a social network, I will always reply to critical emails about my poetry. Contact: rogertab@aol.com].

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Location: London, United Kingdom

Sadly, a bad fall in 2012 has left me with a mobility problem, and being diagnosed with prostate cancer the same year hasn't helped, but I get out and about with my trusty walking stick as much as I can, take each day as it comes and try to keep looking on the bright(er) side of life. Many of my poems reflect the need to nurture a positive-thinking mindset whatever life throws at us.

Thursday 25 September 2014

A Job Half Done OR Planet of the Apes


Have you ever began working on something you don’t really believe in, but felt you had no choice... so  puting any finishing touches to the task in hand was never really on the cards?  You may well have fought against it, given that many if not most of us are inclined to do whatever for a quiet life especially if it means being nagged to get on with it. Yet, at the end of the day, it is not certain people who persist in nagging at us but the lack of those very finishing touches itself; it leaves us feeling not only dissatisfied with our work, but also questioning our resistance to properly completing the job in the first place...so much so sometimes that we find ourselves, if not coming round to that to same point of view with which we found ourselves at loggerheads, at least able to enter into it, grasp something of where it was coming from - to the extent, more often than not, that we cannot leave the job unfinished if only because our hearts tell us it's the right thing to do, even if we are never quite sure why.

Oh, we may choose to put it all down to pride in a job well done, but at heart we may well suspect it is more than that; whether or not we choose to look any further, though, that is down to a sense of conscience we may or may not prefer to own; it is in the latter wherein lies a job but half done, and likely to nag us for the best part of a lifetime...although if it means we never stop asking questions - of ourselves and humanity in general - it may not be such a bad thing after all...

‘What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.’ – Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

A JOB HALF DONE or PLANET OF THE APES

Builder, pondering
a job half done, frowning
under a baseball cap...
(So , what he’s looking at?)
Eco-warriors, armed
with principles in defence 
of treasured open spaces
being eroded by developers
reaping the rewards
of feeding bricks and mortar
to human apes homing in
on concrete jungles, parodies
of natural worlds

Builder, pondering
a job half done, distant grin
under a baseball cap…
(So what's he’s looking at?)
Not scaffolding  
for brand new offices meant
to keep fat cats happy
once staff won over to the view
that a bird in the hand
is worth two in any hedgerow,
and he should know
with a wife, three kids, behind
with the mortgage

Builder at work
on a job half done, furrows
under a baseball cap…
(Now what’s he looking at?)
Towers, like trees, in skies
where birds fly like toy airplanes
and drop like skydivers
on the backs of eco-warriors
guarding nature’s own
from fat cats on the make
that don’t care, can walk away.
a job well done. time to move on 
to the next land grab

Copyright R. N. Taber 2004; 2014

[Note: revised (2014) from an earlier version that appears under the title A Job Half Done in The Third Eye by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2004.]


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