Majid Naficy: Dublin
Tomorrow we go to Blarney Castle
To kiss the Irish stone of eloquence.
But tonight in our warm bed
In memory of James Joyce and Nora
We will chase each other
Sappho: Fragments, on Love and Desire
Like the sweet-apple reddening high on the branch,
High on the highest, the apple-pickers forgot,
Or not forgotten, but one they couldn’t reach…
Elsa Gidlow: Chance
Strange that a single white iris
Given carelessly one slumbering spring midnight
Should be the first of love,
Yet life is written so.
Richard Feynman: Letter to Arline
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you.
Amy Lowell: A Decade
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Edward Harkness: Two Rondeaux
Each time we kiss, love, it’s the first kiss.
The others? Gone. Some I well recall.
More and more I repeated myself. Even this
note to sparrows, willows, summer and fall.
Elsa Gidlow: Constancy
My sister, I keep faith with love, not lovers.
Dawn Potter: The Unicorn Is in Captivity and No Longer Dead
Which do I like better, someone asks, fork or spoon?
And I reply, That’s not a question for Thursday.
Ask me instead how I lost my virginity,
Elsa Gidlow: A Happy Song
Heaped sweets and a treasure
For a new sin to play with,
To pass a night and day with––
Heaped sweets for a pleasure.
Neil Shepard: Mating Behaviors of Storks, Egrets, Humans
We’re out of love again and wandering
with other birdwatchers over the cedar shakes,
spying on spring nesting sites where great
migrations end and settle into familiar patterns
of rearing and weaning.
Abayomi Animashaun: History Lesson
On the wall is a map of places, the so-called explorers
— Mungo Park and the rest of them —
Discovered. But did they know
Of my longing to kiss you tonight?
Mary Jane White: Lindeman
you led me alone
into the sandhills, told me how you were named
for the lindens that grow like smaller oaks
or elms in Europe’s parks
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Ebb
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died
