Winter Sunshine

http://www.authorsden.com/rogerntaber

Today’s post is duplicated on both my general and gay-interest blogs. Oh, and what has winter sunshine to do with being gay? Nothing whatever. Nature is happy to embrace us all so long as we are happy to let it. So let's be happy, yeah? Sadness may well overcome us sometimes, even grief, but we can make it back to happiness if we try, and life is too short not to.

Now, I live in London, and we have been enjoying unseasonably mild and sunny weather across the UK, especially in the south-east. It didn’t last, of course, and the weather is now awful in Scotland and parts of the North of England. It’s sunny but cold here in my part of London (Kentish Town) in London, and a good day to take a stroll on nearby Hampstead Heath. Even if we have a terrible winter at least it will be a relatively short one.

Meanwhile, in the winter sunshine, it is GOOD to see a smile, if only a flicker of one, on the faces of even the most dour among us.

This poem has been requested by ‘Bradley’ for his mother, Helen ‘...for no other reason than I like it and it makes me think of spring.’ Bradley adds that he only discovered the blog recently after a friend gave him On the Battlefields of Love for a birthday present, and ‘...I now read a poem or two most days.’ Welcome to the blog, Bradley! Oh, and here’s wishing you a belated Happy Birthday too.

Bradley adds, ‘I never thought of myself as a poetry person and used to think it was an elitist genre, but am beginning to see what I have missed.’ Now, that made my day. Bringing just one person to poetry for the first time has to be every poet’s dream. I only hope Bradley stays with us when he discovers what my critics insist is an anachronistic passion for rhyme.

WINTER SUNSHINE

Could be forgiven for thinking
it’s already spring

Blue skies, a kindly sun smiling
on huddled streets

Children playing, their laughter
tugging at the heart

A funeral procession demanding
we show respect

Glossy carbuncles confounding
their critics

Second thoughts setting us up
for more mind games

Could be forgiven for thinking
it’s already spring

Copyright R. N. Taber 2007

[From: On the Battlefields Of Love by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2010]