Of Love

To finish up a week of love poetry here's Mary Oliver on maybe the greatest love of all - being in love with the world.


Of Love - Mary Oliver

I have been in love more times than one,
thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting
whether active or not. Sometimes
it was all but ephemeral, maybe only
an afternoon, but not less real for that.
They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,
or anyway beautiful people to me, of which
there are so many. You, and you, and you,
whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe
missed. Love, love, love, it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some — now carry my revelation with you —
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first, and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world — its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself — I imagine
this is how it began.

This Was Once A Love Poem

        

This Was Once A Love Poem - Jane Hirshfield

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

It spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

First Love

First Love - Carol Ann Duffy

Waking, with a dream of first love forming real words,
as close to my lips as lipstick, I speak your name,
after a silence of years, into the pillow, and the power
of your name brings me here to the window, naked,
to say it again to a garden shaking with light.
This was a child's love, and yet I clench my eyes
till the pictures return, unfocused at first, then
almost clear, an old film played at a slow speed.
All day I will glimpse it, in windows of changing sky,
in mirrors, my lover's eyes, wherever you are.

And later a star, long dead, here, seems precisely
the size of a tear. Tonight, a love-letter out of a dream
stammers itself in my heart. Such faithfulness.
You smile in my head on the last evening. Unseen
flowers suddenly pierce and sweeten the air.

Post Parting

Well you can't post love poems without including one on heartache.

This one is both exquisitely beautiful and powerfully heartbreaking.

The Nails - WS Mervin

I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall

Like a calendar in one color.

I wear a torn place on my sleeve.

It isn’t as simple as that.

Between no place of mine and no place of yours

You’d have thought I’d know the way by now

Just from thinking it over.

Oh I know

I’ve no excuse to be stuck here turning

Like a mirror on a string,

Except it’s hardly credible how

It all keeps changing.

Loss has a wider choice of directions

Than the other thing.

As if I had a system

I shuffle among the lies

Turning them over, if only

I could be sure what I’d lost.

I uncover my footprints, I

Poke them till the eyes open.

They don’t recall what it looked like.

When was I using it last?

Was it like a ring or a light

Or the autumn pond

Which chokes and glitters but

Grows colder?

It could be all in the mind.  Anyway

Nothing seems to bring it back to me.

And I’ve been to see

Your hands as trees borne away on a flood,

The same film over and over,

And an old one at that, shattering its account

To the last of the digits, and nothing

And the blank end.

The lightning has shown me the scars of the future.

I’ve had a long look at someone

Alone like a key in a lock

Without what it takes to turn.

It isn’t as simple as that.

Winter will think back to your lit harvest

For which there is no help, and the seed

Of eloquence will open its wings

When you are gone.

But at this moment

When the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye

And my only

Chance is bleeding from me,

When my one chance is bleeding,

For speaking either truth or comfort

I have no more tongue than a wound.

Valentine

 

 

In the words of Ted Kooser: "Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday." It is. Happy Valentine's!

Sestina

This is ingenious. What you can do with merely six words and clever punctuation!

*A sestina, by the way, is a fixed form poem of six verses with six lines in each - or in this case - six words, which repeat in a certain pattern.  It is followed by a three line envoi.



Sestina - Ciara Shuttleworth 

You
used
to
love
me
well.

Well,
you—
me—
used
love
to . . .

to . . .
well . . .
love.
You
used
me.

Me,
too,
used . . .
well . . .
you.
Love,

love
me.
You,
too
well
used,

used
love
well.
Me,
too.
You!

You used
to love
me well.

Hungry Moon

 

 

 

Hungry Moon - Jane Cooper

 

The last full moon of February

stalks the fields; barbed wire casts a shadow.

Rising slowly, a beam moved toward the west

stealthily changing position

 

until now, in the small hours, across the snow

it advances on my pillow

to wake me, not rudely like the sun

but with the cocked gun of silence.

 

I am alone in a vast room

where a vain woman once slept.

The moon, in pale buckskins, crouches

on guard beside her bed.

 

Slowly the light wanes, the snow will melt

and all the fences thrum in the spring breeze

but not until that sleeper, trapped

in my body, turns and turns.

Snowdrop

 

Yes, many many welcomes! 



The Snowdrop - Alfred Lord Tennyson

Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid!
Ever as of old time,
Solitary firstling,
Coming in the cold time,
Prophet of the gay time,
Prophet of the May time,
Prophet of the roses,
Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid!

Transit

A poem for the times we live in - and good advice too: 
Let it be said, while in the midst of horror, we fed on beauty.


Transit - Rita Dove


If music be the food of love, play on. 

This is the house that music built:
each note a fingertip’s purchase,
rung upon rung laddering

across the unspeakable world.
As for those other shrill facades,
rigged-for-a-day porticos

composed to soothe regiments
of eyes, guilt-reddened,
lining the parade route

(horn flash, woodwind wail) . . .
well, let them cheer.
I won’t speak judgment on 

the black water passing for coffee,
white water for soup.
We supped instead each night

on Chopin—hummed our grief-
soaked lullabies to the rapture
rippling through. Let it be said

while in the midst of horror
we fed on beauty—and that,
my love, is what sustained us.