I loved it!!
Such a tender poem,
Such a tender soul!!

I’m watching the movie Gloria Bell on TV and this poem caught my attention. I really Love it! It oozes passion & authenticity.

Don’t watching the movie today on Netflix I just had to research the poem it is the most beautiful poem I have ever read or even more so, heard read

Thank you very kindly for posting this poem. I saw the movie several months ago and searched for that poem. Finally, I came across it on your website. I have been thinking about that scene in which he reads it to her ever since.

Hi. Thanks for the post. Wanted to note in Gloria Bell they’re sitting on her couch while he reads the poem to her. It’s very open, but lacks the intimacy of a bedroom which I think was deliberate. Words and being vulnerable is just as intimate or can be than having sex with someone. Food for thought. That was my take.

I did not know it, but I loved to meet this “Poem for a young friend who wanted to take her own life”, by Claudio Bertoni.

xoxo

Sabrina Mix | Table setting, décor, travel & DIY Ideas
http://chezmix.com

I adore this one by Michael Ondaatje, it shows such love, attention and the passing of time:

7 or 8 Things I Know About Her (A Stolen Biography)

The Father’s Guns
After her father died they found nine guns in the house. Two in his clothing drawers, one under the bed, one in the glove compartment of the car, etc. Her brother took their mother out onto the prairie with a revolver and taught her to shoot.

The Bird
For a while in Topeka parrots were very popular. Her father was given one in lieu of a payment and kept it with him at all times because it was the fashion. It swung above him in the law office and drove back with him in the car at night. At parties friends would bring their parrots and make them perform what they had been taught: the first line from Twelfth Night, a bit of Italian opera, cowboy songs, or a surprisingly good rendition of Russ Colombo singing “Prisoner of Love”. Her father’s parrot could only imitate the office typewriter, along with the ching at the end of each line. Later it broke its neck crashing into a bookcase.

The Bread
Four miles out of Topeka on the highway – the largest electrical billboard in the State of Kansas. The envy of all Missouri. It advertised bread and the electrical image of a knife cut slice after slice. These curled off endlessly. “Meet you at the bread,” “See you at the loaf,” were common phrases. Aroused couples would park there under the stars on the open night prairie. Virtue was lost, “kissed all over by every boy in Wichita”. Poets, the inevitable visiting writers, were taken to see it, and it hummed over the seductions in cars, over the nightmares of girls in bed. Slice after slice fell towards the earth. A feeding of the multitude in this parched land on the way to Dorrance, Kansas.

First Criticism
She is two weeks old, her mother takes her for a drive. At the gas station the mechanic is cleaning the windshield and watches them through the glass. Wiping his hands he puts his head in the side window and says, “Excuse me for saying this but I know what I’m talking about – that child has a heart condition.”

Listening In
Overhear her in the bathroom, talking to a bug: “I don’t want you on me, honey.” 8 a.m.

Self Criticism
“For a while there was something about me that had a dubious quality. Dogs would not take meat out of my hand. The town bully kept handcuffing me to the trees.”

Fantasies
Always one fantasy. To be traveling down the street and a man in a clean white suit (the detail of “clean” impresses me) leaps into her path holding flowers and sings to her while an invisible orchestra accompanies his solo. All her life she has waited for this and it never happens.

Reprise
In 1956 the electric billboard in Kansas caught fire and smoke plumed into a wild sunset. Bread on fire, broken glass. Birds flew towards it above the cars that circled round to watch. And last night, past midnight, her excited phone call. Her home town is having a marathon to benefit the symphony. She pays $4 to participate. A tuxedoed gentleman begins the race with a clash of symbols and she takes off. Along her route at frequent intervals are quartets who play for her. When they stop for water a violinist performs a solo. So here she comes. And there I go, stepping forward in my white suit, with a song in my heart.

Have you ever read “Topography” by Sharon Olds? So sexy and funny. The first time I heard it, I was a freshman in college at a private university (read: conservative), and they invited this musician, Linford Detweiler of Over the Rhine, to come and play a small concert. He played the piano and in between songs he read poems, and this is one he read. I was totally mesmerized by it and I’ve never forgotten it. I was already an English major, but that moment made me fall in love with poetry in a new way.

Interesting enough this poem was written by Bertoni for a young friend of his who attempted to kill herself. Its context provides a nuanced perspective on the piece. Still a beautiful poem.

First of all – the comment sections of this blog are the BEST THING EVER!
Second of all, being a translator, I can tell you that it’s not easy to make translated poetry sound this beautiful. So although part of being a translator is being invisible – the translator of this poem deserves some love and respect…

that poem sounds more like a mother to a child….doesnt sound “romantic” between two lovers. just my opinon, still so sweet.

I read this at my friend’s wedding seventeen years ago. She asked me to choose a poem to read and I was worried the title would be off-putting…!

The Difficulty That Is Marriage by Paul Durcan

We disagree to disagree, we divide, we differ;
Yet each night as I lie in bed beside you
And you are faraway curled up in sleep
I array the moonlit ceiling with a mosaic of question-marks;
How was it I was so lucky to have ever met you?
I am no brave pagan proud of my mortality
Yet gladly on this changeling earth I should live for ever
If it were with you, my sleeping friend.
I have my troubles and I shall always have them
But I should rather live with you for ever
Than exchange my troubles for a changeless kingdom.
But I do not put you on a pedestal or a throne;
You must have your faults but I do not see them.
If it were with you, I should live for ever.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

*tear rolling*…. My two favorite short romantic lines are the Walt Whitman Quote “We were together, I forget the rest”
AND my all time favorite singer/song write Josh Ritter (also crush)
From the song Strangers:
“I just can’t believe we were ever strangers”

The second I hear that song start, just melting away over here……

And to relate this post back to celebrity crushes: John Turturro (swoon!)

How beautiful! There’s something about Chilean poets and their way of expressing love that really gets me. At our wedding, our friend read this excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVII, and I will forever love it.

I love you without knowing how or when or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this;
where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes shut as I fall asleep.

My husband and I read this poem by Margaret Atwood at our wedding.

Variation on the Word Sleep
Margaret Atwood, 1939
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

“All I Know About Love” by Neil Gaiman is my favorite. The line about hands reaching in the darkness is just so true. It wasn’t read at our wedding last summer because I didn’t stumble upon it until after we got married, but every time I re-read it, it feels so deeply “our poem,” especially when I brush against my husband in bed and re-remember he and his love are real.

“This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.
This is everything I have learned about marriage: nothing.

Only that the world out there is complicated,
and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,
and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,
is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another
hand to squeeze
and not be alone.

It’s not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it’s what they
mean.
Somebody’s got your back.
Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn’t
want to rescue you
or send for the army to rescue them.

It’s not two broken halves becoming one.
It’s light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both
safely home.
Because home is wherever you are both together.

So this is everything I have to tell you about love and
marriage: nothing,
like a book without pages or a forest without trees.

Because there are some things you cannot know before you
experience them.
Because no study can prepare you for the joys or trials.
Because nobody else’s love, nobody else’s marriage, is like
yours,
and it’s a road you can only learn by walking it,
a dance that cannot be taught,
a song that did not exist before you began, together, to
sing.

And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,
not knowing for certain if someone is even there.
And your hands will meet,
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.

And that’s all I know about love.”

My two favorite love poems are sonnets:

Sonnet XXX by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

I get the chills EVERY TIME.

Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

I discovered this one thanks to the TV show “My So-Called Life” – I love the message that it’s OK to love a woman who’s not perfect – a woman who’s REAL.

This one, by Matthew Olzmann, gets me every time with its tenderness and humor.

MOUNTAIN DEW COMMERCIAL DISGUISED AS A LOVE POEM

Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Kahlo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—
there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,
which you paid for with your last damn dime
because you once overheard me say that I liked it.

Here’s one about loving your single self. I swoon everytime.
https://tanyadavis.bandcamp.com/track/how-to-be-alone
♡♡♡

what is the name of the poem?

So many beautiful poems! If you like poetry, you should listen to The Slowdown podcast with Tracy K. Smith. It’s a 5 minute daily poem and it’s so wonderful: https://www.apmpodcasts.org/slowdown/

This is soo delightful!

Adding this favorite from W.H. Auden:

O Tell Me The Truth About Love

Some say love’s a little boy,
And some say it’s a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
Some say that’s absurd,
And when I asked the man next door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn’t do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It’s quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I’ve found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn’t even there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton’s bracing air.
I don’t know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn’t in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I’m picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our evening routine lately has been for me to read to my husband from Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs, until I hit one that makes me cry (so many of them!) and then he rubs my back to soothe me. It’s so nice to feel cozy together, and to chat about all the wonderful dogs we’ve known before we go to sleep. I’m still not all the way through the book, on account of the crying, but with his help I’m sure we’ll finish it.