a holiday for the poet

The obvious statement that roses are red and violets are blue, never sounds more sweet yet more trite than on Valentine's day. It is a day of love for the professional prose lyricist and the novice alike. A day in which we all become poets. After all, there is nothing more worthy of being called a poem than the raw, honest words that pour from a lovers heart--both starry-eyed and scorned alike.

I don't know about you, but no bouquet of roses or box of chocolates would make my heart beat quite as fast as a few simple words written straight from the heart--love made legible. And if the words don't come so easy to you, below are a few from some of the all time greats. I'm sure they wouldn't mind sharing it with you for your someone special. I can guarantee your someone special won't mind.


I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You
By Pablo Neruda

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood


Juke Box Love Song
By Langston Hughes

I could take the Harlem night
and wrap around you,
Take the neon lights and make a crown,
Take the Lenox Avenue busses,
Taxis, subways,
And for your love song tone their rumble down.
Take Harlem's heartbeat,
Make a drumbeat,
Put it on a record, let it whirl,
And while we listen to it play,
Dance with you till day--
Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl.


When I Met My Muse
By William Stafford

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.

--

So this Valentine's Day, immortalize your love, timelessly etch it to the page and into the soul of your other.

xox

i would give you the 'the wide ocean'...

but the wide ocean is already yours, and mine, and ours. so i give you neruda. because i know he--like the ocean--speaks to your spirit. happy birthday to you, my mermaid <3

Ocean, if you were to give, a measure, a ferment, a fruit

of your gifts and destructions, into my hand,

I would choose your far-off repose, your contour of steel,

your vigilant spaces of air and darkness,

and the power of your white tongue,

that shatters and overthrows columns,

breaking them down to your proper purity.

Not the final breaker, heavy with brine,

that thunders onshore, and creates

the silence of sand, that encircles the world,

but the inner spaces of force,

the naked power of the waters,

the immoveable solitude, brimming with lives.

It is Time perhaps, or the vessel filled

with all motion, pure Oneness,

that death cannot touch, the visceral green

of consuming totality.

Only a salt kiss remains of the drowned arm,

that lifts a spray: a humid scent,

of the damp flower, is left,

from the bodies of men. Your energies

form, in a trickle that is not spent,

form, in retreat into silence.

The falling wave,

arch of identity, shattering feathers,

is only spume when it clears,

and returns to its source, unconsumed.

Your whole force heads for its origin.

The husks that your load threshes,

are only the crushed, plundered, deliveries,

that your act of abundance expelled,

all those that take life from your branches.

Your form extends beyond breakers,

vibrant, and rhythmic, like the chest, cloaking

a single being, and its breathings,

that lift into the content of light,

plains raised above waves,

forming the naked surface of earth.

You fill your true self with your substance.

You overflow curve with silence.

The vessel trembles with your salt and sweetness,

the universal cavern of waters,

and nothing is lost from you, as it is

from the desolate crater, or the bay of a hill,

those empty heights, signs, scars,

guarding the wounded air.

Your petals throbbing against the Earth,

trembling your submarine harvests,

your menace thickening the smooth swell,

with pulsations and swarming of schools,

and only the thread of the net raises

the dead lightning of fish-scale,

one wounded millimetre, in the space

of your crystal completeness.

-pablo neruda