Readers often comment that I appear to be having a love
affair with rhyme.
Is it ‘a generation thing’ they want to know, perhaps
because most modern poetry is blank verse, and all the more abstract for it. Well,
maybe it’s ‘a generation thing’ and maybe not. Whatever, I find rhyme a useful
tool in getting my meanings across without the reader having to struggle to understand
various abstracts. As far as I am
concerned, there are no hard and fast rights or wrongs about writing poetry
except for critics of the nit-picking variety.
I do write blank verse occasionally, but I find rhyme - including
internal and ‘hidden’ rhyme – brings me closer to the reader, and hopefully
vice versa.
I will be 70 this year and get so fed up with people of my
generation – gay and straight, male and female – heaving sighs of regret for
all they haven’t done with their
lives. We need to harvest what we have done, memories of people and places
collected along the way, and take pleasure in the trains of thought these
generate instead of complaining about the quickness of time leaving us only too
little of it to spare. Besides, it is never too late to start giving Time a run for its o'clocks...
A reader who says he hates rhyming verse also writes in now
and then to ask, ‘why do you bother with the gay stuff?’ Well, why not, since I
am gay?
Enough said…
GROWING OLD WITH PRIDE
Much
of life may have passed me by,
much
of love left me (so) alone,
much
of truth left me high and dry,
its
flair for logic cut me to the bone
Much
of time has seen dreams fail me,
much
of space left me in freefall,
much
of dogma done its best to nail me
to
this tarred fence, that graffiti wall
Much
of society, I’d prefer not to serve
much
as a sentence without parole;
much
of the world, we can but observe
turns
on china plate or begging bowl
Much
of my body has failed to treasure
harvest
moons stumbled across,
much
of my mind, to conventions told
a
lion’s share of lies…at no great loss
Yet,
for the life of me, adrenalin flows
for
the loves it has known and live on
where
a Joy of Being flowers and grows,
regardless
of time, space, or reason
For
much of me looking back with regret,
more
of me lives for each new day;
more
of me still, to nature, forever in debt,
not
least for birthing me human and gay
Copyright R. N.
Taber 2015
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