Valentine’s Day isn’t just about romantic love —it’s a celebration of love in all its forms. From passionate romance to deep friendship, self-love to love that endures through loss, poetry has a way of capturing every shade of the heart. In celebration of Valentines Day, I’m sharing my favourite love poems that explore the many ways we feel and express love.
Excerpt: Admonitions to a Special Person
by Anne Sexton
Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes) ,
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won’t be heard
and none of your running will end.
Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Special person,
if I were you I’d pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.
I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you’ll root
and the real green thing will come.
Did This Happen To Your Mother? Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot?
by Alice Walker
I love a man who is not worth my love. Did this happen to your mother?
Did your grandmother wake up for no good reason in the middle of the night?
I thought love could be controlled. It cannot.
Only behavior can be controlled. By biting your tongue purple rather than speak. Mauling your lips. Obliterating his number too thoroughly to be able to phone.
Love has made me sick.
Did your sister throw up a lot? Did your cousin complain of a painful knot in her back?
Did your aunt always seem to have something else troubling her mind?
I thought love would adapt itself to my needs. But need grow too fast;
They come up like weeds. Through cracks in the conversation. Through silences in the dark. Through everything you thought was concrete.
Such needful love has to be chopped out
or forced to wilt back, poisoned
By disapproval from its own soil.
This is bad news, for the conservationist.
My hand shakes before this killing. My stomach sits jumpy in my chest.
My chest is the Grand Canyon sprawled and empty over the world.
Who ever he is, he is not worth all this.
And I will never unclench my teeth long enough to tell him so…
Small Kindness
By Danusha Lameris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
i carry your heart with me [i carry it in]
by EE 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 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)
Perhaps
by Vera Brittain
Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue.
And feel once more I do not live in vain,
Although bereft of You.
Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet
Will make the sunny hours of Spring seem gay.
And I shall find the white May blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.
Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.
Perhaps some day I shall not shrink in pain
To see the passing of the dying year,
And listen to Christmas songs again,
Although You cannot hear.
But, though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.
In Blackwater Woods
By Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
The Orange
by Wendy Cope
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.
Excerpt from Frida Kahlo’s Diary
by Frida Kahlo
In saliva
on the paper
in the eclipse.
In all the lines
in all the colors
in all the jars
in my chest
outside, inside
in the inkwell
in the difficulties in writing
in the wonderment of my eyes
in the last moons of the sun
(the sun doesn’t have any moons) in everything
To say in everything is imbecile and magnificent.
Diego in my urine- Diego in my mouth- in my heart, in my
madness, in my dream, in the blotting paper- in the tip of the pen,
in the pencils- in the landscapes- in the food- in metal-
in my imagination. In my sickness- in the ruptures- in his
lapels—in his eyes-in his mouth-in his lie.
Featured image Le Lit ‘In Bed’ by Toulouse Lautrec (1892)
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