People often tell me I should concentrate on my general poetry and
‘forget the gay stuff.’ But the ‘gay stuff’ is as much a part of me as the rest
so I will press on. If some readers and critics don’t like it…well, they don’t
have to read it. Besides, I can’t win; the same critics tell me that my
poetry is too conventional, that rhyme and ‘form’ poetry is old hat and I’m an
anachronism etc.
Let them rant. As long as people continue to read the blog and continue
to email me from time to time to say they have enjoyed a poem, I'll press
on.
Now, this may not be one of my better poems but sometime after it
first appeared on the blog in 2008, I received a lovely email from someone who
had read it aloud to his family in the course of telling them he is gay. He
didn’t say what he or they thought of the poem but it doesn’t matter; what
matters is that ‘afterwards…it was hugs all round.’ It appears they are a
religious family, too, plainly inspired by a spirituality that lends itself to
love no less than to religion. Oh, but how wonderfully reassuring!
I should add that for every LGBT person who has emailed to say they feel
rejected by family members and /or friends, others have said they have been
reconciled, even if it has taken awhile for those same family members
and/ or friends to understand that our sexuality makes not a scrap of
difference in the sense that we are the same person whom they have come to
love, regardless.
HEART TO
HEART
I told
family and friends
how, come
what may,
I’ll
tread a straighter path
for being
gay
I remain
the same person,
sharing
with you still,
a
universal understanding;
love
conquers all
If love
imposes conditions,
what does
that imply,
other
than the human heart
has told
its spirit a lie?
Let those
without a dream
to call
their own
rally all
life’s lonely losers
to cast
the first stone
Copyright
R. N. Taber 2004; 2020
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