4 of My Favorite Poems About Love

Plus, Join us for Poetry Co-Promotion Group This Sunday and Show Love to Your Fellow Poets

Dear Poets,

Last month at our co-promotion group, the author Jeannine Hall Gailey shared some inspiring stories and useful tips for promoting your poetry, the poetry of your friends, and your published books.

Even if you missed her discussion, paid subscribers can get the materials she shared at the bottom of this post. If you’re like me, and need accountability and support to do something as scary as promote your own work (aaaaaaagh!!! What if nobody likes me???) I invite you to join us at our co-promotion group this Sunday. Paid subscribers will see the link to register for this event at the bottom of this post as well.

Now, Here are 4 of My Favorite Love Poems

Memory is a Greek island 
by Meghan Sterling

twisted in the red dust, blue anemones,  
gray olives, green figs, keeled over 
in Aegean winds. 
Here I declared my love of open spaces.  
Snapshot of hair blown into sculpture  
afer a day of walking.  
Snapshot of moonlight on the sea,  
still cold from remembering winter.  
Snapshot of six nuns in blue habits laughing  
in the bed of a new pickup truck careening  
over the rocky trail down to Parikia.  
Every village a different arrangement of white stone,  
blue doors and blue sky, sky that swallowed all sound into itself  
like a church. We were still friends then,  
before we fell into too much space. 
Here, the wind blew salt over the fields of rock 
and we learned the plants like a new language: 
dianthus, lantana, kite flower,  
as we climbed the hill to see the ships  
come into the harbor.  
I decided here to love all that I was given,   
no matter how much it hurt. 

First Poem for You
by Kim Addonzio


I like to touch your tattoos in complete

darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of

where they are, know by heart the neat

lines of lightning pulsing just above

your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue

swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent

twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

 

to me, taking you until we’re spent

and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss

the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until

you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists

or turns to pain between us, they will still

be there. Such permanence is terrifying.

So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.


Quarantine
Eavan Boland
1944 –2020

In the worst hour of the worst season

    of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.

He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

     He lifted her and put her on his back.

He walked like that west and west and north.

Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.

    Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

     There is no place here for the inexact

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.

There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

      Also what they suffered. How they lived.

And what there is between a man and woman.

And in which darkness it can best be proved.


Hate Poem
By Julie Sheehan

I hate you truly. Truly I do.
Everything about me hates everything about you.
The flick of my wrist hates you.
The way I hold my pencil hates you.
The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.
Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

The little blue-green speck of sock lint I'm trying to dig from under my third toenail, left foot, hates you.
The history of this keychain hates you.
My sigh in the background as you pick out the cashews hates you.
The goldfish of my genius hates you.
My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors.

A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious symbol of how I hate you.

My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate.
My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate.
My pleasant "good morning": hate.
You know how when I'm sleepy I nuzzle my head under your arm? Hate.

The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit practices it.
My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you.
Layers of hate, a parfait.
Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate,
I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one individually and at leisure.
My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate, which can never have enough of you,
Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.



Yes. I know that last one is kind of surprising. Read it again though, and you'll see it is definitely a love poem.

If you want to write more about love, join me this Monday for Unexpected Love Poems!

You Made it Weird

Writing a love poem can be decidedly difficult, especially if you want to make it unique or original. Yet, we as poets must persist in finding new ways to talk about love. In this workshop, we’ll draw on some of my favorite love poems from Matthew Olzman, Julie Sheehan, Hannah Gamble, Jeannet Winterson (I know, she’s technically a novelist), Victor Infante, Eavand Boland, and others to find new ways of addressing one of the oldest subjects of poetry. Everyone is welcome to join!

This is included in a month long membership to The Daily Poet at The Poetry Salon, which you can register for at the link below.

Subscribe to The Daily Poet $49/Month

Subscribers will also get access to all of the other workshops we offer below, and Meghan Sterling’s Ekphrastic Workshop, happening in March.

Not enough time to write during the week? Try joining this substack and get access to our Special Sunday Only workshops.

Imagining New Narratives: Writing Ekphrastic Poetry

Ekphrasis is a word many poets are familiar with—from the Greek, “to speak out”—

it has become synonymous with “the art of describing art”.

While ekphrastic poetry is often defined as the writing of poetry about works of visual art, the tradition is truly focused on the close observation of objects and experiences, observation which connects with writing about the world, the environment, and the self. This makes ekphrastic poetry a beautiful venue for deepening one’s relationship to art.

What do you see? What is absent? Where is the self in the image? Where is the not-self? Writing from art can be a challenge in seeing, sensing, and feeling into the image—not only what was intended, but what is there.

Join poet Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) and View from a Borrowed Field (Winner of the Paul Nemser Poetry Prize) for a workshop on writing ekphrastic poetry to expand your poetic toolbox—a world of discovery lies inside responding to the image.

Paid Subscribers will See the Link to Sunday Workshop Below.