Friday 30 January 2015

Whatever Happened to Agreeing to Differ?


[Update: 25th Dev 2018]: It is Christmas Day, and the UK is very much divided over Brexit, I am all for freedom of speech, but why must so many people with opposing points of view take it all so personally? It is a poor indictment of human nature ...] RT

Some time ago, I met a refugee from Iran who recounted some horrific details of torture and worse that gay associates had met at the hands of its religious police.

Here in the West, we are, for the most part, able to move freely and openly as gay men and women. Even so, each and every one of us is only as free as our environment allows us to be.
Even in the so-called ‘tolerant’ West, as elsewhere in the world, there are gay boys and girls, men and women, whose reason for  continuing to feel they have to suppress their natural gay nature from family, peers, and work colleagues is invariably down to varying degrees of socio-cultural-religious intolerance.

May each of us, to the self, be true. We are not a race of clones...yet...thank goodness.

 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO AGREEING TO DIFFER?

My family,
friends and neighbours,
why despise me
because I cannot be as you
have been led to believe
I should be by those
suppressing empathy with mind,
body and spirit
or humanity’s getting the better
of dogma?

My people,
why can we not be as one
on the same earth,
under the same sky, from birth
till time and nature bring
all divisions to heel
in a dimension that dares despatch
socio-cultural-religious thought
to the living poetry of a common  
humanity?

My country,
why do you persecute me
for being gay…?
What can I say, but it is no sin
against God or humankind
to be, yes, human …
How can any religion condemn
the likes of me
for simply reclaiming
my identity?

Copyright R N Taber 2015



Monday 12 January 2015

Tongues of Fire


A friend once commented that it's no good expecting to just fan the flames of love; we have to be prepared to jump right into them. True enough. (Gay or straight.) Firstly, though, we need to find someone to help get them started.

As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, 'We must act out our passion before we can feel it.'

TONGUES OF FIRE

Whenever we make love,
the heat of its passion brands
our names on the heart,
lips parting to kiss, receive
tongues of fire, conspire
with nature’s finer beauty
to reignite its spirit in the poetry
of our lovemaking

We burn, mindful of witches
once burned at stakes  
for daring to repudiate status quo,
be true to the inner self,
no matter how the outside world
may (more often than not)
bury heads in sand rather than
let its naysayers stand up
and be counted, content to deny
countless centuries of lying
to children about graffiti sprayed
wherever bigotry lifts
its ugly head, and loves to claim
the moral high ground

Let us be joined together
in ecstasy, make peace
with a world too busy turning
on its own pretty rhetoric
to see that love means (far) more
that being or appearing)
oh, so socially, culturally, religiously
 'politically correct’

Meanwhile, gay lovers the world over
(still) made to run for cover…

Copyright R. N. Taber 2004; 2015

[Note: an earlier version of this poem appears as ‘Pyromania’ in The Third Eye by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2004; revised edition in e-format in preparation.]



Tuesday 6 January 2015

Reaching out with Mind-Body-Spirit


One of the most hurtful things anyone has ever said to me was that I would not see my friend again after he died because he (being gay) would go to Hell while I (still in the closet at the time) would be in heaven. Everyone had liked my friend, including the person who made the comment.

I was clear about my sexuality at the time, but years of being made to feel some kind of freak meant that only a few people I trusted knew I was gay. I had distanced myself from religion years earlier so the threat of Hell did not touch me. What did touch and hurt me was the suggestion that gay people should be punished for their sexuality alone. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this is utter rubbish. While I don’t believe in a God, as such, I find comfort, joy and spirituality in nature.

Maybe I see ‘God’ in nature but prefer to call it something else. Whatever, of this I am certain; if there is a God along the lines various Holy Books tell us, He (or She) is no homophobe, Nor is that just the poet in me speaking or even because I am gay, but what nature tells me every day.

I am sometimes criticized for ‘getting romantic’ about death. There is, of course, nothing romantic about dying. At the same time, the experience of loving someone who has died is one that transcends life, love, and even death. Various socio-cultural-religious bigots who would have us believe this does not apply to gay lovers are but demonstrating an incredible ignorance of the human condition.

We live, we die. Without love and romance, why bother? Moreover, we should remember that love comes in all shapes and sizes; partner to partner is but one form of loving albeit one of the most precious. We can make it big in the fame game or get rich one way or another. But fame lasts only for a select few and it’s no use to us once we’re dead. Nor can we take a pot of gold to the Great Beyond. 

Ah, but love… in whatever shape or form...

[Image taken from the Internet]

Gay or straight, love we get to keep, such is its timelessness.

REACHING OUT WITH MIND-BODY-SPIRIT

You wear jeans, your shirt is white;
hair, a crown of gold in the soft twilight
like a god in fields spring green,
the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen

I watch in awe, rooted to the spot
as you chat with flowers, this tree, that bird
in a voice as sweet as Pan’s own flute,
the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard

I catch your eye, rush into your arms,
savour full, moist lips crushed against mine,
a murmuring of centuries-old charms
turning salt water on my tongue into wine

Too soon you leave, yet sweeter my agony
for a love that lends us immortality

[From: Accomplices to Illusion by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2007]








Monday 5 January 2015

Good Heavens


It always upsets me whenever anyone gets in touch to say they are being bullied at school or at work, hounded at home or in the street or whatever, wherever, because certain people know or suspect they are gay. Being treated for prostate cancer, it doesn’t do much for my self-confidence either when certain well-meaning people suggest I should amend my take on religion ‘in case things don’t work out.’ Even so, as regular readers may well be weary of hearing me say, I am content to put my trust in nature.

There is no excuse for homophobic behaviour unless it is sheer ignorance. So I am posting today’s entry on both my general and gay-interest blogs in the hope that the more vulnerable gay reader may take heart and the less enlightened heterosexual (regardless of sex, colour, creed, age or position in society) take note.

There are many facets to identity of which sexual identity is but one. As I have often said, it is the whole that counts.

Regardless of social, religious, cultural or, yes, sexual identity, we should be judged, (by those who set themselves up to judge) for our approach to life and people; kindness, respect, a capacity for compassion and other forces for good should not be undermined, as they often are, by our mistakes and failures. Most if not all of us make mistakes. Most if not all of us fail at something sometimes. Worse, we may fail other people, however unintentionally. We might think we have failed ourselves, and that may be true although I suspect we are often too hard on ourselves. Life is tough, and few of us survive emotionally and/or psychologically and/or physically unscathed by all it throws at us from time to time. Human nature is a complex organism; a living organism, not a machine.

The natural world, too, is a complex organism and one to which we can all relate and are related. So I have little time for people whose socio-cultural-religious bigotry insists that Earth Mother (God by any other name?) would condemn anyone for their sexuality alone. Certainly, none of the Holy Books - including the Quran - imply this is the case. Oh, ‘devout’ Christians can quote Leviticus at us, but that is Old Testament and it is the New Testament that counts if you are a follower of Christ. Besides, relatively few Jewish people are homophobic and Judaism has its roots in the Old Testament. [I will never understand why so many religious-minded people are homophobic when the Holy Books they claim to revere are not.]

Whatever a person's religion, no one will ever convince me that any God worth believing in would see a person's sexuality as any kind of a barrier to His (or Her) loving them. Religions appear to agree that God is Love. Why then should any God create any world - human or natural - where the kind of discriminatory attitudes perpetuated by certain people are encouraged by the very societies in which they live?  It makes no sense, which is precisely why I subscribe to no religion and choose instead to take the sense of spirituality that inspires me from nature, free as it is of dogma.

If nature does not have a problem with same sex relationships (there is evidence of this in the natural world) why should humankind?

GOOD HEAVENS 

Godly people have asked me
why I ‘flaunt’ my sexuality;
I say, flaunt it I never would,
but (surely?) openness has to be
a force for good

Godly people have despised me
for ‘soiling’ my identity,
asking why I feel no shame
for staining my natural integrity
with a ‘dirty’ name

I tell these godly people I’d rather
tell the truth than be a liar
to please to them and their kind,
suggest they look within themselves
for other axes to grind

Godly people have maligned me
for defending my sexuality,
as anyone with integrity would
when openly accused of resisting
a force for good

Godly people have pitied my soul,
for placing it in such peril
by a penchant for mortal sin
that would see me burn in Hell,
disowned by Heaven

I tell these godly people, I’d rather
be left to die on barbed wire
than toe this Faith's line or that
although I remain in the line of fire
for refusing to submit

Such godly people, they walk away,
despairing of anyone gay,
unable to accept the likes of me
are proud to hear Earth Mother say,
‘Child of mine, go free.'

Ah, but even godliness can deceive
(some wear it on their sleeve)
by denying sex, colour, sexuality,
much of a muchness rites of passage
defining all humanity

However and wherever the inner eye
sees God (or not) who can deny
spirituality but suffers, oh, so terribly
from leadership skills resolved to rely
on prayer and hypocrisy?

Faith takes many shapes and forms,
transcending everyday norms;
a key to open up hearts and minds,
confident in how it performs to carry on
asking the right questions

Could it be their guarded hostility,
(the godly people who tell me
I’m a poor ‘sinner’ for being gay)
derives from a repressed humanity
demanding a right of way?

Besides, no religion is fit for purpose
that would deny gay people a voice
 .

Copyright R. N. Taber 2011



Saturday 3 January 2015

O-U-T, Notes on the Psychology of Perception


This poem takes me back to my (much) younger days and helps me forget I will be 70 later this year..

As a teenager and younger man, I used to prefer sex with older men. Now, I am the older man. Oh, dear, is that not so scary? It often strikes me that time doesn’t just fly, but zooms past me as I grow old(er). [Not old, not quite, not yet...well, maybe…]

Since I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in February 2011 and began hormone therapy, I confess I have lost all interest in sex. Mind you, I don’t miss it (blame the hormones) and take great pleasure in my memories, often drawing on them for my poems. Yet, who knows ...? Maybe if I met the right person even at this late stage in my life…and there’s always Viagra. <>

This poem is a villanelle.

O-U-T, NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERCEPTION

Eyes of gentle grey
telling lies that are true
(seeing that I’m gay)

Lovers at play,
dark skies turning blue;
eyes of gentle grey

Some might say
I was vulnerable to you
seeing that I’m gay

Truth on its way
in a loving word or two,
eyes of gentle grey

No pressure to stay.
Oh, but how I wanted to,
seeing that I’m gay

Came out one day,
perceiving myself in you;
eyes of gentle grey
seeing that I’m gay …

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2014

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears under the title 'Found Out' in A Feeling for the Quickness of Time by R N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2005.]

Friday 2 January 2015

Making Peace with Nature

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

[Update 27/9/2019: Aware that I do not use social media myself, readers often ask if they can post a link to any of my poems on social media or simply recommend any of my blogs by title. No, I don’t mind at all.  If you want to recommend, go ahead, and many thanks; the more readers, the more feedback. The only reason I do not use social media myself is because I am in my 70’s now and not well these days. I simply do not have the time as everything takes so much longer; working on a poem can take days anyway, and there is always shopping and housework to be done besides regular visits to my GP surgery or the Macmillan Cancer Centre (for my prostate cancer) and replying to any feedback that gives an email address. (I ignore spam emails.) While I have always enjoyed meeting up with readers who are visiting London, whether for a few drinks, a meal or just chatting over a coffee, I have mobility problems now and cannot get out and about as often as I would like, but feel free to get in touch any time even if it's just an email to say hello. I don't post comments because they take up too much space, but I will always reply to emails with 'Poetry' in the subject field; feedback is always welcome.] RNT

Meanwhile...

We spend a lifetime listening to nature, but how much do we really hear, and to how much of that do we relate and act upon…?

MAKING PEACE WITH NATURE

One evening,
I imagined birdsong asking
what I was doing,
dying of wishful thinking
of you

Come morning,
I heard grasshoppers telling
tales on my dreaming
of embracing, being kissed
by you

At mid-day,
I heard a honey bee buzzing
to just about anyone
willing to listen, I’m in love
with you

Come twilight,
catching me out still thinking
of telling you one day
that I am gay, but scared
of losing you

Darkness falling,
and I can hardly see for all
you’re telling me
through tears, in denial
for years

Midnight chiming
and declaring loud and clear
(for anyone to hear)
how you and I rediscovered
each other

Life, flying as high
as our love means to take us;
gay lovers cocking an ear
to nature’s song, and singing
along…

Copyright R. N. Taber 2014