Love Poems and a Pipe Dream

All my life, I’ve been fascinated by partnership: love, sex, fantasy, emotional bonding, loss and transference. I’m also a sucker for poetry. So today, I’m celebrating Valentine’s Day by sharing a selection of favourite poems about love. They are not listed in any particular order, and this is certainly not exhaustive - there are so many more that bring me joy.   

Following these is an original piece, which I only lump with the others for ease, and not because I consider it (even nearly) in league. It’s there because, in an effort to realise a dream that my self-criticism and inability to consider anything complete have always prevented me from, I’ve decided to self-publish a collection of poetry centering around love and partnership. If you choose to read that collection, you’ll find a more extensive explanation of its theme and contents in its preface.

That will come soon; for now, enjoy.

Love After Love - Derek Walcott

The time will come 
when, with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving 
at your own door, in your own mirror 
and each will smile at the other's welcome, 

and say, sit here. Eat. 
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored 
for another, who knows you by heart. 
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes, 
peel your own image from the mirror. 

Sit. Feast on your life.

The Fist - Derek Walcott

The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. The has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

Poem 85 - Catullus

I hate and I love.
Why you may ask.
I don’t know.
But I feel it happening and am tortured.

Valentine - Lorna Dee Cervantes

Cherry plums suck a week’s soak,
overnight they explode into the scenery of before
your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past.
Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds.
Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they
light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds.
They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear
them through another tongue as the first year of our
punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar
forward. They land like seasoned rocks on the
decks of the cliffs. They take another turn
on the spiral of life where the blossoms
blush & pale in a day of dirty dawn
where the ghost of you webs
your limbs through branches
of cherry plum. Rare bird,
extinct color, you stay in
my dreams in x-ray. In
rerun, the bone of you
stripping sweethearts
folds and layers the
shedding petals of
my grief into a
decayed holo-
gram— my
for ever
empty
art.

Longing - Matthew Arnold

Come to me in my dreams, and then
by day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
the hopeless longing of the day.

Come, as thou cam’st a thousand times,
a messenger from radiant climes,
and smile on thy new world, and be
as kind to others as to me!

Or, as thou never cam’st in sooth,
come now, and let me dream it truth,
and part my hair, and kiss my brow,
and say, my love why sufferest thou?

Come to me in my dreams, and then
by day I shall be well again!
For so the night will more than pay
the hopeless longing of the day.

Untitled - Rumi

I realize that the dawn
when we’ll meet again
will never break,

so I give it up,
little by little, this love.

But something in me laughs
as I say this, someone

shaking his head and chucking
softly, Hardly, hardly.

Flesh - Maia Muttoo

I flayed myself for love.

I thought the skin was re-building itself,
but so many times this week alone…

After all these centuries,
humans have not learned how to live
with memory.

I can blind myself with tears
every few weeks,
but it doesn’t help me to un-see the lights at the end of the shipping dock, or
the hairs on your forearms that I liked
to run my hand over.

My spirit tangled irrevocably with theirs;
when finally, the skin re-shapes itself,
it will trap them inside me where they can scratch from within.

Poems from: Poetry Foundation; Poem Hunter; Birdsong: fifty three short poems (trans. Coleman Barks); I Hate and I Love (pub by Penguin Classics).