Love poems

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Miscarriage

© Jennifer Reeser

Fold this, our daughters grave,
and seal it with your kiss.
For all the love I gave,
you owe me this.

Its a jade branch on the floor, broken in two, love,
or a stain raised on the lapped grains of a suede glove.Its the lace, blown by a strong breeze, of an old gown
with the cranes crying at night, lost in their long sound.Its a vase made from the noon light in a closed place,
and it falls, shatters the sharp edge of a jewel case.Its the Muse, mute with a shell clenched in her left hand,

Should You Ask At Midnight

© Jennifer Reeser

What would I do without your voice to wake me?
Cor ad cor loquitur, Im loath to know.
Kitsch operas sound, unhesitant to shake me,
The sheers undrawn, the heavens hardly showing,

French Quarter Singer

© Jennifer Reeser

Strumming your polished guitar with long, nail-lightened fingers,
where are you now, leaning forward a peasant-dressed arm
lark on the near side of midnight, my crescent curb lady,
ear to your sound, dangling each with a silver folk charm?

Wednesday

© Marvin Bell

Gray rainwater lay on the grass in the late afternoon.
The carp lay on the bottom, resting, while dusk took shape
in the form of the first stirrings of his hunger,
and the trees, shorter and heavier, breathed heavily upward.

These Green-Going-to-Yellow

© Marvin Bell

This year,
I'm raising the emotional ante,
putting my face
in the leaves to be stepped on,

The Self and the Mulberry

© Marvin Bell

I wanted to see the self, so I looked at the mulberry.
It had no trouble accepting its limits,
yet defining and redefining a small area
so that any shape was possible, any movement.

Life

© Marvin Bell

I leave the office, take the stairs,
in time to mail a letter
before 3 in the afternoon--the last dispatch.
The red, white and blue air mail

I, or Someone Like Me

© Marvin Bell

In a wilderness, in some orchestral swing
through trees, with a wind playing all the high notes,
and the prospect of a string bass inside the wood,
I, or someone like me, had a kind of vision.

The Return of Persephone

© Alec Derwent Hope

Gliding through the still air, he made no sound;
Wing-shod and deft, dropped almost at her feet,
And searched the ghostly regiments and found
The living eyes, the tremor of breath, the beat
Of blood in all that bodiless underground.

The Pleasure of Princes

© Alec Derwent Hope

What pleasures have great princes? These: to know
Themselves reputed mad with pride or power;
To speak few words -- few words and short bring low
This ancient house, that city with flame devour;

Standardization

© Alec Derwent Hope

When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose;

Phallus

© Alec Derwent Hope

This was the gods' god,
The leashed divinity,
Divine divining rod
And Me within the me.

Parabola

© Alec Derwent Hope

Year after year the princess lies asleep
Until the hundred years foretold are done,
Easily drawing her enchanted breath.
Caught on the monstrous thorns around the keep,
Bones of the youths who sought her, one by one
Rot loose and rattle to the ground beneath.

Meditation on a Bone

Words scored upon a bone,
Scratched in despair or rage --
Nine hundred years have gone;
Now, in another age,
They burn with passion on
A scholar's tranquil page.

Easter Hymn

Make no mistake; there will be no forgiveness;
No voice can harm you and no hand will save;
Fenced by the magic of deliberate darkness
You walk on the sharp edges of the wave;

Death of the Bird

For every bird there is this last migration;
Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.

Crossing the Frontier

Crossing the frontier they were stopped in time,
Told, quite politely, they would have to wait:
Passports in order, nothing to declare
And surely holding hands was not a crime
Until they saw how, ranged across the gate,
All their most formidable friends were there.

Conquistador

I sing of the decline of Henry Clay
Who loved a white girl of uncommon size.
Although a small man in a little way,
He had in him some seed of enterprise.

Commination

Like John on Patmos, brooding on the Four
Last Things, I meditate the ruin of friends
Whose loss, Lord, brings this grand new curse to mind
Now send me foes worth cursing, or send more
- Since means should be proportionate to ends -
For mine are few and of the piddling kind: