You-Me-Us, Love and let Love

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

Today's poem first appeared on the blogs in 2014.

Oh, but roll on spring, a renewed zest for life, love, nature...always so much a part of us even as winter would have its wicked way with us. Winter, though, even as a season of the human heart such as Covid-19 has imposed on the world, cannot win; if spring simply hibernates, who says the spirit of spring ever hibernates...?

Now, love comes in all shapes and sizes and is just about everywhere you look from childhood through adulthood into our older years; we just need to keep our minds and hearts open, and have no stereotypical ideas about love’s 'ideal'.

Nothing and no one can live up to an ideal. But if growing up is all about getting real, it doesn't have to take anything away from the everlasting beauty of love...unless we let it.

As for gay love…Well, love doesn’t discriminate against us so by what right does anyone? Sadly, there have always been bigots - in one form or another - and no new, better, kinder world was ever built in a day ... we can but do our best to keep tackling chips on shoulders and hidden agendas in tablets of stone.

We may well happen to think a couple in love are not suited to one another for one reason or another, but it is not up to us to impose our feelings on them. However well-meaning any uninvited interference or intrusion concerning the affairs of others, even loved ones, we need to be there for them, not cold shouldering because they choose not to take our 'advice'.

Various socio-cultural-religious issues need to translate into love just as they were invariably intended before certain individuals and groups chose to impose their own interpretations. Similarly, personal integrity needs to embrace the wider implications of human love or what worth social, cultural, religious or political identity? (Yes, and sexual identity too.)

As I have said before on the blogs, our differences do not make us different, only human. We may nurse misgivings, even downright disapproval about the love two people plainly have for one another, but it is neither our business nor right to judge or reject them because they conflict with socio-cultural-religious values, traditions or stereotypes imposed upon us since birth.

The world changes and we need to change with it, clearly discriminating between human values and human vanity as we do so.

Dis I say it was easy?

This poem is a kenning.

YOU-ME-US, LOVE AND LET LOVE

Sworn to ride a dragon

across the world,

home course preferred,

winging our way across skies

a cloudy grey for the sun,

as joyfully (if often fearfully)

we, our seasons run,

whatever the damage done

by Man or nature

Let winds blow, rain gnash

its teeth at us, cyclones

crash into our poor defences,

smash every window, door,

sending cars flying, leaving us

but recourse to initiative,

mind over matter where hearts

dare disprove the universal cynic,

the wavering doubter

Sweet song of a nightingale

lights up our darkness,

heaping comfort on loneliness…

Come dawn, voice of a lark

homing in on us at the very edge

of history, encouraging us

to focus once more on a kinder

landscape than left worn and torn

by nature and Man

To myth, legend, and fairy tale,

I, Love bring certainty ...

Copyright R. N. Taber 2003; 2013

[Note: An earlier version of this poem first appeared in an anthology, My Love, Poetry Now [Forward Press] 2003 and subsequently in The Third Eye by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2004.]