Valentine's Day Brings Poems About Love.

To start our love poems, Li Ch'ing Chao who lived in China around 1011.

Year after year, a little drunk
Out in the snow, we tucked white blossoms into our hair
plum blossoms. And later we ravaged them, thoughts far from pure.
so my petals drenching our robes in crystalline tears.

This year, beside a distant sea at the edge of heaven
in wind-scoured silence, the white streaks in my old hair.
It's late, I know, and the wind is fierce:
There won't be a single blossom in sight.

Three poems from Karl Wendt

we kissed
your lips were so closed
--------
the sound of your
hair
burns like incense
in my mind
--------
she brings me a ship
to sail away in

Thunder Bay's Sharon Irvine speaks of marriage in her book Watching the Parade.

I Do

"I do": subject and verb
a simple construction,
nervously uttered on a warm summer day,
slips so easily, painfully, into the past tense
as children have children
and the homilies of one generation
clothe the next.

Family, friends, community
and
the two of you:
ecstatic loving, hurtful arguments
hard decisions, shared laughter
A teeter-totter.

But sometimes
a fine balance.

A beautiful partnership:
love, acceptance and respect,
a quiet joy,
an easy fit like an old cardigan.
And it all seems
so right,
so good, so worth whatever it cost.



From England, Bill Appleby sent me this poem of love lost.

Strangers when we met for coffee in a pub

The flowers she said How thoughtful

She was kind and sympathetic

We hugged when we parted

Coffee in pubs, lunches, orchids, talk and laughs

Books, letters, postcards exchanged

hugs and kisses when we met and parted

Sometime she smiled at me

The grievous wound began to heal

Lunch cancelled

She was ill

Overload my e-mail with affection to cheer and amuse

Backfired

Reply to sender

You are too demanding and invade my space

A second wound.

The final poem from Elizabeth Kouhi from her book Waiting for Greening celebrates a grandmother's love.

A Grandmother's View

Just yesterday, or maybe
the other morning he was
crawling in the grass and weeds
exploring new worlds under
his uncle's tutelage -
now in a yellow kayak
that reflects on the brown bay
underscored by green shores
he is reading Iphigenia
of Tauris prepping
for first year English
a different kind of exploring.