At Freedom's Call

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

This post appears at the request of a young man living in Europe and afraid for many friends back home in his native Uganda who live in constant fear or persecution, prison and worse. I have expressed his fears better in other poems, but this is the one he chose because, as he puts it so succinctly,  'everyone has a right to love, no exceptions...'

Gay Rights have come a long way in the West since I was young, but we still have a long way to go before everyone achieves sufficient maturity and sense of fair play to recognise that we are just ordinary people with a positive a contribution to make to contemporary society as anyone else. [Religious fundamentalists and intrinsically homophobic clerics please take note...and grow up!] Uganda, of course,  is just one of many African countries where the repression of and attacks on gay people are a public disgrace to humanity. What makes it all so much worse is that this attitude is encouraged and promoted by radical evangelicals who claim to speak for God. Well, that just goes to show how dangerous ignorance can be since the New Testament and Holy writings associated with other religions assure us that God is Love and love does not discriminate in this way, certainly Jesus of Nazareth never would. I may be non-religious, but I feel very strongly that the way some 'middle management' religious leaders take it upon themselves to misinterpret central aspects of religion for their own bigoted ends.

We are all, each and every one of us, entitled to be free of the shackles of various socio-cultural-religious prejudices  worldwide.

Here's looking forward to the day when gay people around the world are free to express their sexuality without fear of persecution from the less enlightened among the heterosexual majority.

AT FREEDOM’S CALL

Once I played among green hills in summer,

listening to songbirds, watching them fly,

running free, hand in hand with my gay lover

our dream, like a kite, reaching for the sky

In purple hills, come autumn’s reds and gold,

I saw birds winging free of winter’s threat,

leaves painting pictures of we two grown old,

our dream, like a kite, playing hard to get

Once I walked in white hills at winter’s call,

heard a robin sing in a tree stripped bare,

nor did it flinch or fly off at the first snowfall,

our dream, like a kite, returning us there

If summer short, autumn brief, winter dead,

be love’s eternal spring taken as read

  

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