Winter Warmers

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

It is only human nature to be curious. From time to time, people have asked me (usually in good faith) what it’s like to be gay. They might as well have asked what it’s like to be a human being.  It is our differences, after all, that make us human.

These days, the same people are more likely to ask what it’s like to be growing old! (I was 68 yesterday, the winter solstice.)

Now, some people warn against looking back and insist we should only look forward. I see where they are coming from, but as I get older, I take great pleasure in mulling over happy times. Moreover, I come through the experience feeling more ready, willing and able to take on whatever the future may have in store, including death.  No, I am not being morbid. Death is as much a part of life as life itself so where’s the harm in thinking about it sometimes? Thinking about issues can lend them a degree of familiarity in the mind’s eye; the more familiar we are with them, the less afraid we become.

I have had my fair share of ups and downs in life and had to cope with regular bouts of depression since early childhood. Even so, in the sense that I don’t have the HIV-AIDS virus, I have led a charmed life!  

While relatively few of my gay-interest poems are strictly autobiographical, there is a lot of ‘me’ in all of them as I try to recapture something of that charmed life and pass it on for others to enjoy.

  

COMFORT AND JOY

The hair is greyer

than yesterday;

one more furrow

on the brow;

sight a shade less clear

than it used to be;

hearing, yes, definitely

getting worse…

What now?

A kind heart beats

as yesterday;

no fewer dreams

to inspire…

still time enough to learn

from life’s ups

and downs, good to chat

with old friends…

By the fire

Counting blessings

in the flames;

seeing (oh, so, clearly)

my flaws, mistakes,

but at peace with myself,

and my sexuality,  

mortality, too, since even

at my worst…

I did my best

Copyright R. N. Taber 2002; 2011

[Note: This poem has been slightly but significantly revised from an earlier version that first appeared in an anthology, Mind Games, Poetry Today (Forward Press) 2001 and subsequently in  First Person Plural by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2002.]

View From A Bedroom Window OR On Seeking Inspiration and a Voice

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

I wrote this poem in 2003; it is based on another I wrote when I was just thirteen years-old and growing up in my home town of Gillingham in Kent. In those far-off days, the view from my bedroom window was much as the poem describes. I was born in that same house and the bedroom remained mine until the family moved across the river shortly after my 14th birthday.

Our red (Irish) setter was called Barney and next-door’s cat was named Jakesey. Barney was 14 years-old when he got ill and had to be put down. Jakesey had long since been found dead one morning (at a good if uncertain age) under the hydrangea bush, his favourite place.

At the time I came across the original poem, I was already an adult and had not lived in Gillingham for many years. The poem took me back to my old bedroom, and it was a comfort as I was missing a boyfriend with whom I had enjoyed a passionate fling before his return to Australia only a few days earlier. [After a relationship with someone that lasted only a few years before he was killed in a road accident, I was destined to have to settle for occasional flings…]

I loved that room. It was my bolt-hole, a refuge from family, school and other problems with which I hadn't a clue how to cope. Nothing was ever the same after we moved away and life would get a whole lot worse for a teenage Roger Taber (not least for struggling to express a sexuality that was considered criminal then) before they began to get any better. Ah, but that’s another story…part of which you may well read between the lines in another poem...

VIEW FROM A BEDROOM WINDOW or ON SEEKING INSPIRATION AND A VOICE

Stone yard below,
honeysuckle crowding
a trellis gate

Red setter on the alert
to make a break for it, see
the world

Next-door’s cat
yawning, teasingly,
on a fence...
leaning, precariously
over a flowering hydrangea,
but in no danger
from a dog’s
merely quivering
snout

Reflections of a bed
left unmade, where I sleep
without you...
dancing with daisies
on a lawn untouched since
you’ve been gone,
left me alone
with a dog, next door’s cat
and…what?

Shopping, cleaning,
washing-up, contemplating
irons in the fire

Dog ears pricking,
killing time till it sides with
the heart’s desire


Copyright R. N. Taber 2004; 2012

[Note: I have changed the appearance of this poem on the page and slightly revised the last stanza from the original version as it appears in The Third Eye by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2004.]