Poems for Your Weekend
Love Poems Edition
Dear Friends,
I never got around to posting love poems on Valentine’s Day, so here are some wonderful poems for you two weeks after the designated celebration of such things.
On Episode 601 of The Slowdown, Ada Limón remarked, “To this day, I will swear that the hardest poems to write are love poems. Especially when the world feels brutal and desperate and hope is hard to find.” That sentiment certainly holds true at the moment. “If I try to write a love poem, my brain says: How can you write about love when what we need is health care and racial equality and a way to heal the whole goddamn earth? And still my pen goes to the page, and wants to shout about love. I suppose there is always some part of me that cannot resist writing about the hummingbird that survives the hurricane.”
I think many of us can relate to this feeling. Indeed, many of us feel like that hummingbird in the hurricane. And: we need love poems now more than ever.
Here’s Sappho (trans. Julia Dubnoff) on the subject:
Some say an army of horsemen,
some of footsoldiers, some of ships,
is the fairest thing on the black earth,
but I say it is what one loves.
As ever, let me know which poems and lines resonated with you. Please feel free to share your own love poems in the comments.
xM
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Thanks for this post, Maya – it's always the right time for a love poem, even if Valentine's Day is a little in the rearview mirror. Since most work in this category is about the desire for attachment or the mourning of its loss, I am going to post in favor of married love. Here are two Wild Sonnets written to my wife – one during our 25th year together and another written in celebration of our 30th anniversary.
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Wild Sonnet #125 –
The headlong and havoc in the heart –
Such longings make us lean, and can
Never pass for love. The ache that hollows
In the cavity and region of the ribs,
A suction and consumption of the soul –
What other vacancy can claim to be
At the fork of feeling and divinity?
----
That is to love as the seed is to the tree,
As mere conception to the act
Of constancy. More to the meaning are
The mornings of a hundred seasons spent
In talk, or the nights that numberless go by,
Where the sinking stars will from the sky
Look back upon the light of you and I.
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Wild Sonnet #318
For thirty years one bed has nightly held
Our bodies both in the quilt and cover
That marriage at its best can be. Separate
As our dreamings must by nature be housed
Alone, a single room has coupled them,
And laid our rest and reveries – side to side,
Man and angel, a boy of blessings and his bride.
----
Tradition whispers these to be the days
Of pearl, a globe of gleaming hidden
In the hardness of a fretted shell. In this
Description lies, and yet is true in this:
Amid a world of turbulence and tides
We have together taught the sands to shine
Into a singled thing that's yours and mine.
So good! I love seeing Auden’s name written out in full. The Caroline Bird poem takes my breath away, so impeccable.