Monday, 29 September 2014

Immortal Beloved


Regular readers will know that my partner and I only has a few years together before he was killed in a road accident, and that was a long time ago. I think about him every day. Yes, I am often sad because I miss him, but it is a sadness tempered with the joy of having loved him and been loved in return; it always lifts me, and rams home the message that love never dies.

I experimented with drugs in my long-ago youth until someone told me that you can never get higher than getting high on love. So who needs drugs? Oh, but that is so true. Love is the only high worth having if only because it lasts the longest, continuing to let people like me access a spiritual dimension that has nothing to do with either religion or sexuality...and why should it?

Among the many wonderful qualities of love is that it does not discriminate against anyone, whatever our race, religion, sexuality ... Oh, yes, and age too.

IMMORTAL BELOVED

My gay love gave me a yellow rose
so that I might always recall in my heart
how love, if tended, nurtured, grows,
to a flowering only wisdom can impart

My gay love gave me an apple green
so that I may always savour at every bite
that what was, is now, always has been,
Tree of Knowledge filtering Eden’s light

My gay love gave to me a gentle kiss
to which my heart responded with its all,
a thank you for a lifetime of summers
whose birdsong a metaphor for the soul

My gay lover passed away some years ago,
but love never dies, this I've come to know

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2019

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



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