Valentine’s Day is a great day for Poem Elf to come out from the shadows, a conceit which makes me sound like an online vampire. Let’s say instead that I’m emerging from the ground to have a look around, a virtual groundhog, ready for a change of seasons.
Anyway, here I am, posting my annual love poem blitz, thanks to a letter (an actual handwritten letter) from Ceci, my oldest sister. At the end of her short note, she wrote, “I wonder what Poem Elf will do for Valentine’s Day?” Truth be told, Poem Elf had no plans to do anything for Valentine’s Day except think about the Peppermint Patty she wouldn’t be having because Valentine’s Day is also Ash Wednesday. So thank you, Ceci, for that gentle nudge.
Let’s get right to it then and begin our poem tour with straight-up passionate love. I taped Amy Lowell’s “Vernal Equinox” to a gate that marks the trailhead of a favorite walk of mine.
Erotic energy surges through the poem at a level that feels almost too intimate to read. By the time we get to the final lines— “Why are you not here to overpower me with your/tense and urgent love?”—I have to think, please, whoever you are, for the love of God give this woman some relief!
The same poet explores love at a later stage in “A Decade,” which I taped below the first.
“Smooth and pleasant” may not be the most romantic description of a beloved, but saying that you are “completely nourished” by another person points to a love more solid and more beautiful than mere romance.
The lookout by the Kilauea Lighthouse is a favorite Poem Elf site, and I’m sure I’ve used it before for Valentine’s Day. With all the photographers and tourists stopping there, I know a poem is guaranteed an audience, which is what William Meredith’s “A Major Work” deserves.
It’s a sneaky little poem. The title promises an epic; the first stanza sounds like light verse; then the final lines travel warp-speed to the profound. Love and art, Meredith says, are irrepressible: “At last mind eye and ear/And the great sloth heart will move.”
Another favorite Poem Elf spot on Valentine’s Day is the local post office. As I’ve said before on this on annual post (and I’ll probably say again), I miss having a mother to send a card to. In lieu of a private note, I taped “Mother” by Lola Ridge near the mailbox that years back would have held a love letter to my own dear momma.
If, when you were growing up, you didn’t get this from your mother— “Your love was like moonlight/turning harsh things to beauty”—I hope you have found it from someone else. We all deserve to be loved this way.
Speaking of deserving love, I taped Maya Angelou’s “Seven Women’s Blessed Assurance” to a table outside a women’s clothing store. I left it as an antidote to certain cultural notions of what makes women attractive.
This is such a fun poem, but important too. Seven women, each with a different body type and of a different age, brag about how attractive they are to men. It’s all about confidence, baby. Love thyself, ladies and gentlemen!
I slipped “Love Letter to a Stranger” by Jenny Browne between covers in a used book “store” outside a local bakery. Maybe on Valentine’s Day, a stranger, a stranger to me anyway, will find it. And for those of you reading “Love Letter” on this post, for those of you who might think there is no one in your life who loves you at this moment, maybe the poem will inspire you to find your own love to give the strangers around you.
I need a lot more space to explore this wonderful, dense, gorgeous poem. Strangers on a plane connect and imagine connection with all the life forms around and below them, each in a style unique to them—open-heartedly like the woman in 12C who needs “variety,” or with “caution” like the man across the aisle with the burned ear. I’ve read this a dozen times and I keep going back.
Lastly, I taped “Pax” by D.H. Lawrence to a boulder in the parking lot of a nearby beach.
A lot of homeless people live here, in tents and old vans, so the idea of a hearth and a cozy fire and a master and a mistress seems slightly ludicrous. If you are a non-believer, a poem with the phrase “the house of the God of Life” may seem ludicrous as well. But be you housed, unhoused, believing, not believing, I wish you joy and peace on this day of love: “a great reassurance/a deep calm in the heart.”
Happy Valentine’s Day, dear readers!
Here are all the poems above, in case you want to print out one for your own Valentines:
Vernal Equinox
by Amy Lowell
The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies
between me and my book;
And the South Wind, washing through the room,
Makes the candles quiver.
My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy with the thrusting of green shoots
Outside, in the night.
Why are you not here to overpower me with your
tense and urgent love?
A Decade
by Amy Lowell
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
A Major Work
by William Meredith
Poems are hard to read
Pictures are hard to see
Music is hard to hear
And people are hard to love
But whether from brute need
Or divine energy
At last mind eye and ear
And the great sloth heart will move.
Mother
by Lola Ridge
Your love was like moonlight
turning harsh things to beauty,
so that little wry souls
reflecting each other obliquely
as in cracked mirrors . . .
beheld in your luminous spirit
their own reflection,
transfigured as in a shining stream,
and loved you for what they are not.
You are less an image in my mind
than a luster
I see you in gleams
pale as star-light on a gray wall . . .
evanescent as the reflection of a white swan
shimmering in broken water.
Seven Women’s Blessed Assurance
by Maya Angelou
1
One thing about me,
I’m little and low,
find me a man
wherever I go.
2
They call me string bean
‘cause I’m so tall.
Men see me,
they ready to fall.
3
I’m young as morning
and fresh as dew.
Everybody loves me
and so do you.
4
I’m fat as butter
and sweet as cake.
Men start to tremble
each time I shake.
5
I’m little and lean,
sweet to the bone.
They like to pick me up
and carry me home.
6
When I passed forty
I dropped pretense,
‘cause men like women
who got some sense.
7
Fifty-five is perfect,
so is fifty-nine,
‘cause every man needs
to rest sometime.
Love Letter to a Stranger
by Jenny Browne
Tell us of a bypassed heart beating in 12C,
how the woman holds a stranger’s hand
to the battery sewn in beneath her collarbone,
and says feel this. Tell us of the man’s ear
listening across the aisle, hugging itself,
a fist long since blistered by blaze.
Outside, morning sun buckling up.
Inside, twitching bonesacks of bat, birdsong
erupting as light cracks the far jungle canopy.
Ten thousand feet below ours, a grey cat
tongues the morning’s butter left out to soft.
Last night we broke open the sweet folds
around two paper fortunes. One said variety.
One said caution. The woman in 12C would hold that
her heart needs its hidden spark, but the man shows
how some live the rest of their lives with half a face
remembering its before expression. Who was it
that said our souls know one another
by smell, like horses?
Pax
by D.H. Lawrence
All that matters is to be at one with the living God
to be a creature in the house of the God of Life.
Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the mistress,
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.
Sleeping on the hearth of the living world
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of the master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life.
I’ve missed your great postings! This was a super collection, thank you!
Thank you for reading!