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.]



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