Saturday, 26 October 2019

The Hurt Garden OR Dreams, Turning Us Over


This poem is taken from my general blog archives for February 2015. 

So far, feedback suggests that most readers appreciate being given a sense of how both blogs share more than those readers inclined to read just one or the other may have realised, often for having been influenced - knowingly or unknowingly - by misleading if not exaggerated stereotypes. 

Such is the complexity of human nature that some if not most of us are too often and too easily encouraged by various socio-cultural-religious forces - active in all parts of the world - to rush to a judgement that is not ours to make; an opinion, yes, we are all entitled to that, but rather than judging others, should we not be content to unite in agreeing to differ than divide...?

Most if not all of us have a hurt garden where we prefer not to go in waking moments. Sleep, though, invariably has other ideas…

Dreams may well leave us confused, but mind, body and spirit have a way of making make more sense of us there than any waking moments; it sounds depressing, perhaps, but I see it as part of a healing process in the making rather than breaking of a common human spirit, able to rise above the worst human nature can throw at it and which, if slowly but surely, will find its way into our waking consciousness, whoever and wherever we may be, if we but let it.

Did I say it would be easy...?

THE HURT GARDEN or DREAMS, TURNING US OVER

Blades of grass
tossing to and fro in the wind
like restless sleepers
trying to make sense of a kind
where logic and reason
have no place, square up to facts
of human nature
from which its indigenous hosts
would run away
but nature will ever have its say
in dreams, struggling to make sense
of us

Stems of flowers
swaying to and fro in a breeze
like drunken crowds
on losing their heads to whims
where logic and reason
have no place lest they make more 
of human nature
than excuses its indigenous hosts
from home truths
put aside, inclined to have a say
in dreams, struggling to make sense
of us

Dead leaves
drifting here, there, everywhere
like lost children
looking for a place called ‘home’
where logic and reason
concede its predilection for love
of human nature,
lend its indigenous hosts access
to life forces
in denial, ever finding their way 
to us left struggling to make sense
of dreams

Birdsong,
signalling a love of life and nature
to practised ears
in the market (for a guide of sorts)
where logic and reason
have a place, but are never enough
for human nature
whose indigenous hosts ask more
of its humanity
than dream litter left in its garden
on the assumption they will clear up
the mess


Copyright R. N. Taber 2015 

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