You can’t grow up to be a writer of love stories, if you aren’t an incurable romantic.

Despite my own history of picking lemons in the Garden of Love – and oxytocin notwithstanding – I’ve found that I need to believe in true love.  I have seen it – not often – but enough to believe it possible.  My Apache friends say you only need to see one white crow to know all crows are not black.

In the darker days when heartbreak threatened to teeter me into cynicism about true love, and I almost succumbed to a disbelief in its very existence, it comforted me to remember that much of the world’s greatest love poetry had been penned by men – ergo, somewhere, sometime there have been men who loved-deeply, truly and forever.  So it isn’t an impossible dream (at least that’s what I told myself.)  One White Crow, is all you need.

So I offer you just a few of my favorite love poems for your heart’s delight:

Like This

By Rumi

If anyone asks you

how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting

will look, lift your face
and say,

Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,

Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.

Like this.  Like this.

When someone asks what it means
to “die for love,” point
here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers, the space
between the creases on your forehead.

This tall.

When lovers moan,
they’re telling our story.

Like this.

I Carry Your Heart

By e.e. cummings

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in
my heart) I am never without it (anywhere

I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

And this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)

Your Laughter

By Pablo Neruda

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

Tags: love, poems, poetry

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2012 at 4:25 pm You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.