Letters to My Husband Far Away by Gillian Wegener The house is not empty without you. It thrums and bumps, the walls relax and sigh. The water heater dutifully comes on, rumbles with heat, waiting for your shower to start. How many times today have I heard your truck in the driveway, the floor creak with your step, felt your breath against the back of my neck. At least that often, I've turned to tell you something, or hand you a piece of cheese or a plum, but it's two more days until you return. It's just me in this room, with this plum, with this good fortune, with this far-flung love. You can find this in Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection.
Love Poems
Evening Poetry, February 23
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Today is our third wedding anniversary; this poem honors the day and our love for one another.
"I loved you first: but afterwards your love" by Christina Rossetti I loved you first: but afterwards your love Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove. Which owes the other most? my love was long, And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong; I loved and guessed at you, you construed me And loved me for what might or might not be – Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong. For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’ With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done, For one is both and both are one in love: Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’ Both have the strength and both the length thereof, Both of us, of the love which makes us one. You can find this poem in The Complete Poems.
Evening Poetry, September 10
Living Together
by David Whyte
We are like children in the master’s violin shop
not yet allowed to touch the tiny planes or the rare wood
but given brooms to sweep the farthest corners
of the room, to gather shavings, mop spilled resins
and watch with apprehension the tender curves
emerging from apprenticed hands. The master
rarely shows himself but whenever he does he demonstrates
a concentrated ease so different from the willful accumulation
of experience we have come to expect,
a stripping away, a direct appreciation of all the elements
we are bound, one day, to find beneath our hands.
He stands in our minds so clearly now, his confident back
caught in the light from pale clerestory windows
and we note the way the slight tremor of his palms
disappears the moment they encounter wood.
In this light we hunger for maturity, see it not as stasis
but a form of love. We want the stillness and confidence
of age, the space between self and all the objects of the world
honoured and defined, the possibility that everything
left alone can ripen of its own accord,
all passionate transformations arranged only
through innocent meetings, one to another,
the way we see resin allowed to seep into the wood
in the wood’s own secret time. We intuit our natures
becoming resonant with one another according
to the grain of the way we are made. Nothing forced
or wanted until it ripens in our own expectant hands.
But for now, in the busy room, we stand in the child’s
first shy witness of one another, and see ourselves again,
gladly and always, falling in love with our future.
You can find this poem in The Sea in You.
Evening Poetry, August 16
Old Lovers at the Ballet
by May Sarton
In the dark theatre lovers sit
Watching the supple dancers weave
A fugue, motion and music melded.
There on the stage below, brilliantly lit
No dancer stumbles or may grieve;
Their very smiles are disciplined and moulded.
And in the dark old lovers feel dismay
Watching the ardent bodies leap and freeze,
Thinking how age has changed them and has mocked.
Once they were light and bold in lissome play,
Limber as willows that could bend with ease–
But as they watch a vision is unlocked.
Imagination springs the trap of youth.
And in the dark motionless, as they stare,
Old lovers reach new wonders and new answers
As in the mind they leap to catch the truth,
For young the soul was awkward, unaware,
That claps its hands now with the supple dancers.
And in the flesh those dancers cannot spare
What the old lovers have had time to learn,
That the soul is a lithe and serene athlete
That deepens touch upon the darkening air.
It is not energy but light they burn,
The radiant powers of the Paraclete.
You can find this in Collected Poems 1930-1993.
Evening Poetry, August 15
II. Love: VII.
by Emily Dickinson
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the winds
To a heart in port,–
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.
Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!
You can find this in the collection Hope is the Thing With Feathers.
Evening Poetry, July 16
Song
by Edith Wharton
Let us be lovers to the end,
O you to whom my soul is given,
Whose smiles have turned this earth to
heaven,
Fast holding hands as we descend
Life’s pathway devious and uneven,
Let us be lovers to the end.
Dear, let us make Time a friend
To bind us closer with his cares,
And though grief strike us unawares
No poisoned shaft that fate can send
Shall wound us through each other’s
prayers,
If we are lovers to the end.
Let us be lovers to the end
And, growing blind as we grow old,
Refuse forever to behold
How age has made the shoulders bend
And Winter blanched the hair’s young gold.
Let us be lovers to the end.
Whichever way our footsteps tend
Be sure that, if we walk together,
They’ll lead to realms of sunny weather,
By shores where quiet waters wend.
At eventide we shall go thither,
If we are lovers to the end.
You can find this poem in the collection Selected Poems of Edith Wharton.
Evening Poetry, June 27
Poem by Rumi from collection The Essential Rumi.
A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets. Everything
has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.
Evening Poetry, June 24
The TrueLove
by David Whyte
There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.
I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,
and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them
and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and taht moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love.
So that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you don’t want to any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs to yours.
You can find this poem in the collection The Sea in You.
Evening Poetry, June 12
The Sea in You
by David White
When I wake under the moon,
I do not know who I have become unless
I move closer to you, obeying the give and take
Of the earth as it breathes the slender length
Of your body, so that in breathing with the tide that breathes
In you, and moving with you as you come and go,
And following you, half in light and half in dark,
I feel the first firm edge of my floating palm touch
And then trace the pale light of your shoulder
To the faint, moonlit shadow of your smooth cheek
And drawing my finger through the pearl water of your skin,
I sense the breath on your lips touch and then warm
The finest, furthest, most unknown edge of my sense of self,
So that I come to you under the moon as if I had
Swum under the deepest arch of the ocean,
To find you living where no one could possibly live,
And to feel you breathing, where no one could
Possibly breathe, and I touch your skin as I would
Touch a pale whispering spirit of the tides that my arms
Try to hold with the wrong kind of strength and my lips
Try to speak with the wrong kind of love and I follow
You through the ocean night listening for your breath
In my helpless calling to love you as I should, and I lie
Next to you in your sleep as I would next to the sea,
Overwhelmed by the rest that arrives in me and by the weight
That is taken from me and what, by morning,
Is left on the shore of my waking joy.
You can find this poem in the collection The Sea in You.
At Night, When the Wind is Blowing (A Poem)
At Night, When the Wind is Blowing
At night, when the wind is blowing
And the Chestnut’s new leaves are rustling
I think of the first time I climbed the hill
to this house and met you on the steps.
How the spirit of the place made room for me and
invited me to become part of its story.
I remember happy and conflicted days
of everything new and everything
breaking apart. Of wrenching grief and
the starry-eyed hope of starting over.
And I have started over with you.
Who were the first people to walk over
this ground and build their homes here?
To plant fields and grow food for themselves?
Did they feel the land welcome them too?
Did they walk down this road,
when it became a road, hand in hand
in the moonlight, whispering promises?
Did they kiss under the stars and imagine
a life where every day burned bright
like a summer afternoon because they had
found their hearts hidden in each other,
and their home in this place?
The land beneath my feet and the sky over my head
have moved on since that day,
unconcerned through the seasons
summer, fall, winter, spring.
How I have changed and how I have remained myself,
how we have grown together and have begun to live out
the truth about us–that we belong to one another,
that Fate put us in each other’s paths.
I think about this and other things,
at night, when the wind is blowing.
Poem by Kim Pollack/©2019 All Rights Reserved
Life of Kim 