It doesn’t get any better than this

In case that last blog post wasn’t enough poetry for you:

I present a couple of my favorite poems, because today is Valentine’s Day and it’s all about love and I love poetry and poetry loves love. Or something like that. (and not all of these love poems are happy love poems, but as you’ve seen from my poetry, that’s how my mind works)

‘you said Is’

by ee cummings

you said Is
there anything which
is dead or alive more beautiful
than my body,to have in your fingers
(trembling ever so little)?
                           Looking into
your eyes Nothing,i said,except the
air of spring smelling of never and forever.

….and through the lattice which moved as
if a hand is touched by a
hand(which
moved as though
fingers touch a girl’s
breast,
lightly)
        Do you believe in always,the wind
said to the rain
I am too busy with
my flowers to believe,the rain answered

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‘Married couples on vacation’

by Michael McFee

My mother oils my father’s thighs
but he is sleepy, he has just waxed
his black Buick with the whalebone grill
parked right beside them on the beach.
She watches him nap in the hubcap. 

My mother takes my father’s picture
on the pier, he and his pal from work
have been deep-sea fishing all afternoon.
They hoist their modest catch for her
to take back to the cottage and clean. 

My mother poses her new best friend
on the boardwalk, but she looks worried
and the rail has rusted and the bench
is peeling and that row of dark cars
idles near the horizon like a funeral. 

My mother makes snapshots of dolphins,
of hotels and palms and peacocks,
of an empty beach scabbed with seaweed.
“It’s not as bad,” she writes on the back,
“as this might lead you to believe.” 

Someone takes matching photographs
of my parents beside a cypress lagoon.
My dad looks away. My mom looks back
as behind her, a dozen flamingos
all bury their heads in the black water.

—————————————————–

From ‘A Farewell To Arms’

by Earnest Hemingway

(and here, you thought he was a novelist. Ha.)

 

That night at the hotel,

In our room with the long empty hall outside

And our shoes outside the door,

A thick carpet on the floor

Of the room

 

Outside the windows the rain falling

And in the room light and pleasant and cheerful,

Then the light out and it exciting

With smooth sheets and the bed comfortable,

Feeling that we had come home,

Feeling no longer alone,

And not gone away;

All other things were unreal.

 

We slept when we were tired and if we woke

The other one woke too so one was not alone.

Often a man wishes to be alone and

A girl wishes to be alone too

And if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other,

But I can truly say we never felt that.

 

We could feel alone when we were together,

Alone against the others.

 

It has only happened to me like that once.

 

I have been alone while I was with many girls

And that is the way you can be most lonely.

But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.

 

I know that night is not the same as the day;

That all things are different,

That the things of the night cannot be explained in the day,

Because they do not then exist,

And the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people

Once their loneliness has started.

 

But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night

Except that it was an even better time.

—————————————————–

Happy love day!