I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-Y, Love Poems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

As I continue putting together a new collection of general and gay-interest poems, this one caught my eye; it first appeared on the blog in 2011.

People often ask me why I write poetry. I try to answer this in many of my love poems. Although the love of my life died many years ago and we had only a few years together, our love for each other continues to sustain me. Yet, as I often say to people living alone as I do, love comes in many shapes and forms; family, friends, pets, places...all these can be loved and become an integral part of not only our lives but also our whole being.

In my case, my relationship with friends and nature are the focus of my love,  and subsequently my love for poetry; the latter, by the way, is a gift from my dear mother who would often recite poems to me at bedtime as well as reading me stories. She died in June 1976 when I was 30 years-old, but I feel her presence whenever I write a poem just as I feel my late partner’s and others I have loved. Yes, there is sadness in me because I will never see them again, but that is more than compensated for and transcended by love...every day of every year.

Years ago, I wrote a gay love poem which, sadly, I have since mislaid as it predated the age of computers and am unable to rewrite as I have a poor memory after years of hormone therapy for my prostate cancer. At the time, a colleague urged me to submit it to a poetry magazine whose editor subsequently commended me for my efforts while rejecting it on the grounds that gay love poems lack integrity and might well offend regular readers.

Love comes in all shapes and forms and is as changeable as the seasons, in nature and human nature alike; like every season, it gives new life in one breath and takes with another while encouraging us to be be glad for what we have, and make the best of it, rather than dwell on what we have not, and make the worst.

True love is more than eternal, it is eternity, that you-me-us which has characterised human life since its earliest beginnings, and always will. Nor does any culture or religion have a monopoly on its spirituality; the human spirit in us all will see to that, if we will but let it, whoever and wherever we may be.

This poem is a villanelle.

I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-Y, LOVE POEMS

In love poems, discern integrity

touching on all life's finer themes;

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Any prose on contemporaneity

may well rip us apart at the seams;

in love poems, discern integrity

Where some see cruel ambiguity,

love lends out its promising dreams;

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There's a cruelty rooted in bigotry,

humanity but a patch on all it seems;

in love poems, discern integrity

Natural world allowed its dignity,

till Earth Mother's face surely beams;

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Come age, gender, race, sexuality, 

prejudices (still) haunting our dreams;

in love poems, discern integrity,

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Copyright R. N. Taber 2012, rev. 2020

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears under the title' Love, an Epic Poem' in Tracking the Torchbearer by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2012; this post/ poem also appears on my general poetry blog today.]