Love Spelled In Poetry Quotes

Private Parts The first love of my life never saw me naked - there was always a parent coming home in half an hour - always a little brother in the next room. Always too much body and not enough time for me to show it. Instead, I gave him my shoulder, my elbow, the bend of my knee - I lent him my corners, my edges, the parts of me I could afford to offer - the parts I had long since given up trying to hide. He never asked for more. He gave me back his eyelashes, the back of his neck, his palms - we held each piece we were given like it was a nectarine that could bruise if we weren’t careful. We collected them like we were trying to build an orchid. And the spaces that he never saw, the ones my parents half labeled “private parts” when I was still small enough to fit all of myself and my worries inside a bathtub - I made up for that by handing over all the private parts of me. There was no secret I didn’t tell him, there was no moment I didn’t share - and we didn’t grow up, we grew in, like ivy wrapping, moulding each other into perfect yings and yangs. We kissed with mouths open, breathing his exhale into my inhale - we could have survived underwater or outer space. Breathing only of the breathe we traded, we spelled love, g-i-v-e, I never wanted to hide my body from him - if I could have I would have given it all away with the rest of me - I did not know it was possible. To save some thing for myself. Some nights I wake up knowing he is anxious, he is across the world in another woman’s arms - the years have spread us like dandelion seeds - sanding down the edges of our jigsaw parts that used to only fit each other. He drinks from the pitcher on the night stand, checks the digital clock, it is 5am - he tosses in sheets and tries to settle, I wait for him to sleep. Before tucking myself into elbows and knees reach for things I have long since given up.

I gave her a love letter and she returned it back to me by correcting spelling and punctuation.

You cannot spell Poetry without try

Along the field as we came by A year ago, my love and I, The aspen over stile and stone Was talking to itself alone. 'Oh who are these that kiss and pass? A country lover and his lass; Two lovers looking to be wed; And time shall put them both to bed, But she shall lie with earth above, And he beside another love.' And sure enough beneath the tree There walks another love with me, And overhead the aspen heaves Its rainy-sounding silver leaves; And I spell nothing in their stir, But now perhaps they speak to her, And plain for her to understand They talk about a time at hand When I shall sleep with clover clad, And she beside another lad.

Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But, one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and a picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between he individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read! From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came to adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..." Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said: "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit." "Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming: Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not--for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

Love conquers all. I do not mean the exhilarating, spell-bound sort of love that temporarily intoxicates us. I mean the profound, unconditional, Christ-like sort of charitable love that endures forever. That love conquers all.

The intoxication of fragrances casts its magic spell on me.

Don’t ever uncast the spell you have on me.

I am made of all the lessons I learnt, all the dreams I lived, and all the love I give— all the things I can’t count.

I found a room, both quiet and slow, a room where the walls are thick. Where pixie dust is kept in jars, and paper rockets soar to Mars, and battles leave no lasting scars as clocks forget to tick. I guard this room, both small and bare, this room in which stories live. Where Peter Pan and Alice play, and Sinbad sails at dawn of day, and wolves cry 'boy' to get their way when ogres won’t forgive. With you I’ll share my hiding place, this room under cloak and spell. We’ll snuggle up inside a nook, and read a venturous story book, that makes us question in a look what nonsense fairies tell. In fictive plots and fabled ends, Our happy-e’er-afters dwell!

And then she remembered the stranger. She had met him on an April afternoon. In his presence she had felt feelings that she had never felt before. The stranger had touched the innermost parts of her heart! He had done it by just his words. And his presence had made her feel as if she was in a spell!

Pearl comes over, to a shell.... so beautiful, that hard to spell.... even seems, like an angel eye.... relation with whom, gonna tie.... with Sun, it gets its reflection.... explained all without words neither any action.... such a day, as here has risen.... by heart wanna love, not by vision.... Samar Sudha

I slay dragons at night while you sleep. I see by the way your face contorts how they exist in your dreams. Willing a magic sword, I plunge into your deepest nightmares and swing at the beasts with all my might, dodging flames exhaled by monsters that would eat me alive to go on torturing the fair one I love. I see your face relax, eyes still drowsily closed, when the mighty dragon is slain. It may be that my fingers rub soft circles on your forehead as I imagine my brave fight as a knight reclaiming your dreams. You smile under the spell of my touch, and I am rewarded. And so, my love, as I await the dawn, I stand ready to slay dragons while you sleep.

I can’t sing, or dance, or write poetry so I’m just gonna shout this really, really fucking loud,” Orion announced, looking right at me with a smirk on his lips. He raised a hand to his throat, casting an amplifying spell before tipping his head back and hollering so loud that the roof of the cavern rattled. “I am in love with Darcy Vega,

Single parenthood: Where you bite every bullet Suck up spells of pouring rain And wake with open wounds Still dripping with the liquid of yesterday's pain The objective being to simply get up, withstand, endure Fight an inch harder, love a little more And draw a smile on your face Tie a ribbon of calm around your racing heart For the one(s) that you so beautifully adore

The demons, they return to haunt the crimp in my heart. No amount of burning herbs, or magic spells and bitter potions cast the beasts away. Garlic rosaries won't remove the black infection slowly devouring within. Only love, perfect love, casts out the monsters and the fiends that invade like a thief in the night infecting and destroying, attempting to steal my joy. But love is life and I choose life. I choose love. Throw away the herbs, release the spells, let me swallow love's divinity.

Painful memories, they can mend, love’s powerful, but it can rend, through the treacherous act of jealousy. A passion that seeks to destroy, the soul when it deploys, the vicious sin that is envy. Take heed my friends, when contemplating the end of an imagined rival for the heart’s true amour. Acts of envy bode not well, for they cast an evil spell, and in the end you’ll suffer forevermore. For jealously can blight, the harmonious light of all the love you’d hoped to see, because envy has power, and can inhumanly devour, everything you wanted from love, for thee.

Now winter nights enlarge This number of their hours; And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine, Let well-tuned words amaze With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights Sleep’s leaden spells remove. This time doth well dispense With lovers’ long discourse; Much speech hath some defense, Though beauty no remorse. All do not all things well: Some measures comely tread, Some knotted riddles tell, Some poems smoothly read. The summer hath his joys, And winter his delights; Though love and all his pleasures are but toys They shorten tedious nights.

The House Because we lived our several lives Caught up within the spells of love, Because we alays had to run Through the enormous yards of day To do all that we hoped to do, We did not hear, beneath our lives, The old walls falling out of true, Foundations shifting inthe dark. When seedlings blossomed in the eaves, When branches scratched upon the door And rain came splashing through the halls, We amde our minor, brief repairds, And sang upon the crumbling stairs And acned upon the sodden floors. For years we lived at peace, until The rooms themselves began to blend With time, and empty one by one, At which we knew, with muted hearts, That nothing further could be done, And so rose up, and went away, Inheritors of breath and love, Bound to that final black estate No child can mend or trade away.

Those groans men use passing a woman on the street or on the steps of the subway to tell her she is a female and their flesh knows it, are they a sort of tune, an ugly enough song, sung by a bird with a slit tongue but meant for music? Or are they the muffled roaring of deafmutes trapped in a building that is slowly filling with smoke? Perhaps both. Such men most often look as if groan were all they could do, yet a woman, in spite of herself, knows it's a tribute: if she were lacking all grace they'd pass her in silence: so it's not only to say she's a warm hole. It's a word in grief-language, nothing to do with primitive, not an ur-language; language stricken, sickened, cast down in decrepitude. She wants to throw the tribute away, dis- gusted, and can't, it goes on buzzing in her ear, it changes the pace of her walk, the torn posters in echoing corridors spell it out, it quakes and gnashes as the train comes in. Her pulse sullenly had picked up speed, but the cars slow down and jar to a stop while her understanding keeps on translating: 'Life after life after life goes by without poetry, without seemliness, without love.

With language he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together, and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds. Formulated by their art the most insipid statements become enormously significant. For example, I proffer the constatation, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' A self-evident truth, one on which it would not have been worth while to insist, had I chosen to formulate it in such words as 'Black fire-escapes have no bladders,' or, 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie.' But since I put it as I do, 'Black ladders lack bladders,' it becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable, moving. The creation by word-power of something out of nothing—what is that but magic? And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half the world's greatest poetry is simply 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie,' translated into magic significance as, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' And you can't appreciate words. I'm sorry for you.

Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day, she looked at a page and the word “mouse” had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word and the picture of the gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw “horse”, she heard him pawing at the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word “running” hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed sound of each letter and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read! From that time on, the world was hers for the reading, She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was a poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel the closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

Lark’s Song That child who from Diana’s thought is born A huntress swift, who doth the world adorn With strength and passion worthy of the Green May wax, and one day rise to be a queen. That child who in the eye of Phoebus grows Of visage fair, that none would dare oppose May in her hand hold light and glory too, And to the Light hold sternly staunch and true. That child who with the face of Venus smiles, Will bear a heart of mischief and of wiles, And may in time love’s faithful bonds fulfil While bending lesser hearts unto her will. That child who with Athena’s grace doth move May to all eyes her worldly wisdom prove And make right wise and fulsome use thereof To measure all who seek to win her love. That child who with grim Circe’s tongue foretells Enmeshing faithful hearts within her spells By dint of sly mendacity and guile, All innocence and virtue may defile. That child who by her cunning doth connive May by fair Tyche’s fortune wax and thrive And come in time to sit upon a throne; Or fail and fall, forsaken and alone. That child may choose to hark to glory’s call And shine in splendour, loved by one and all; Or cleave to darkness, hated and reviled: Chance crafts the fate of every fate-touched child.

Now this is this, or seems to be. When you're haunted by any variety of effective nonsense, like love or guilt or poetry or memory, which are anyway at their root the same thing - the primary symptom is paralysis. You just can't move. Then, all too rarely, the virus is vanquished, the contagion concluded, the spell broken, the cold front snaps in prismatic splinters. Bright moment, that, and bright moment, next, and so on and so forth. What returns is a sense of the present tense as being not only available, but valid.

I'll know you by those eyes so bright they caught a falling star.

I kept a box filled with time machines. Each trinket is a ticket to the times before everything turns sour. Each moment lasted nothing more than a few seconds. It’s like recalling bizarre dreams, except it’s real a few lifetimes ago.

Our past is a movie I played in a loop round and round, we’re stuck in a pattern

Your and our sea of love! The night sea, calm and silent, With the lapping sound of waves, There my heart wanders, my heart indulgent, And floats with these waves, Into the ocean of feelings, Into the depths of emotions, And I doubt my heart’s dealings, As it creates new waves of emotions, Where I feel wet with your embrace, And the waves of life surround me from every side, And I seek you riding these waves and merge with your grace, Feeling the beauty of your beautiful face that now stares at me from every side, And then my love Irma, I let myself sink to the bottom, As your feelings, your memories, your touch pile over me, And now I can even feel your every atom, As your conscience of love sinks into me, At the bottom of the life’s sea, Where ripples and waves distract the casual seeker of love, Because the pearls lie at the bottom of the sea, Just like you, every moment sinking into me silently, in this sea of love, Where I am the waves, I am the ripples, I am the sea, And you are the motion that keeps me alive, And in this state I shall now forever be, With you and the sea of life forever in me alive, Then at the bottom as you secretly kiss me, Some mariner shall feel the joy in his heart, And so shall begin the cycle of new waves, new tides in the sea, Where now the sea, the waves, the pearl, everything is part of our heart, That beats endlessly over the surface of the sea, To inspire the true mariner of the sea seeking life and love, To him we shall bear the visions of what he can be, A lover, just like you and me, who always finds his true love, So Irma, let the sea of feelings and your memories grow over me, And let me at the bottom lie submerged, in this vivid presence of thee, Where you are the water, the sea, and everything for me, For my true world is created only when I love thee! And this is what my wish for the true mariner of life shall always be, Seeking love, seeking a wave of passion to ride, And dearing to dive into this sea, At the bottom to discover you and me, Lying in the wet embrace that spreads in all directions, Wherever a true mariner turns to see, Our reflections to discover love’s true sensations, And imagines about the wonder if he too with his lover could dwell in this sea, our sea! And see, The wonder of love and the wonder of the sea, Where life grows on the surface and at the bottom too, For I love you Irma on the surface of the sea, And at its bottom too, So let this mariner come and brave the sea of life, As we cast our spell of love in the form of waves and infinite ripples, Let him discover his own meaningful strife, And flow endlessly with these ripples, To finally tarry at the bottom of this sea, Where now his lover shall tame his weary mind, Just like you do it for me, And make me believe even your heart has a mind, a beautiful mind! That often thinks of me, And dares to plunge into the darkness of the sea, Only to seek me, And realise that at the bottom you and I are the life of the sea! Where many mariners and lovers lie in their state humbled, To flow with these waves endlessly, As we at the bottom of this sea lie passionately cuddled, Like the pearl in an oyster, forever and endlessly!

Only with her - PART I Dealing with estranged feelings and the heart’s missing heart beats, Feels like a world that its horizon never meets, It maybe what one experiences in the moment of continuous disbelief, Because without her the mind finds no solace and the heart fails to play the symphonies of relief, As the estrangement grows and the feeling deepens in those prolonged spells of darkness, The night grows over the mind eclipsing its every thought with a slight crassness, Where it feels abandoned by the heart, because it seems to beat only for those estranged feelings, And ah the herculean effort for the mind to nurture the heart’s darling seedlings, From where the heart grows reasons to keep throbbing, and every flexing of muscle seems to be a harbinger of new suffrage, And it somehow always convinces the mind not to let her feelings be cast into scrappage, The heart, the poor beating heart, suffers from this expensive essentialism, To sustain her estranged feelings in its love chambers and in the mind’s thoughts, despite their widening chasm, But the heart loves her unconditionally, and the mind too finally gives in to the heart’s will voluntarily, And now the heart beats for her softly as the mind once again begins to think of her so lovingly, Now both the mind and the heart deal with a different reality, That of establishing her memories, her feelings as the principal deity, But who shall hold her entirely? Because the heart loves her deeply and now the mind too loves her no less, And in their strife; I, who owns them both, has to deal with a new kind of stress, And I only care less, because in their desire to love her forever, the heart will beat endlessly and the mind will think of her ceaselessly, While I collate the extract of their feelings about her, and I live everyday in her thoughts fearlessly, And the mystery grows deeper, that who loves who, they love her, I love her too, and they know, But without them I cannot love her, and without me they cannot exist, this is a reality we all know, However, the desire to love someone so beautiful has made them my foe, and my willingness to keep living for her, Has encouraged them to exploit my weakness, that to always live loving her, As long as the heart beats, the mind doesn't mind, and as long as my mind only her thoughts creates, I too do not mind, Living in a body, where my own heart only beats for her, my mind only thinks about her, while I am busy living for her with feelings well defined, Continued in part II........

Only with her - PART I Dealing with estranged feelings and the heart’s missing heart beats, Feels like a world that its horizon never meets, It maybe what one experiences in the moment of continuous disbelief, Because without her the mind finds no solace and the heart fails to play the symphonies of relief, As the estrangement grows and the feeling deepens in those prolonged spells of darkness, The night grows over the mind eclipsing its every thought with a slight crassness, Where it feels abandoned by the heart, because it seems to beat only for those estranged feelings, And ah the herculean effort for the mind to nurture the heart’s darling seedlings, From where the heart grows reasons to keep throbbing, and every flexing of muscle seems to be a harbinger of new emotional outage, And it somehow always convinces the mind not to let her feelings be cast into scrappage, The heart, the poor beating heart, suffers from this expensive essentialism, To sustain her estranged feelings in its love chambers and in the mind’s thoughts, despite their widening chasm, But the heart loves her unconditionally, and the mind too finally gives in to the heart’s will voluntarily, And now the heart beats for her softly as the mind once again begins to think of her so lovingly, Now both the mind and the heart deal with a different reality, That of establishing her memories, her feelings as the principal deity, But who shall hold her entirely? Because the heart loves her deeply and now the mind too loves her no less, And in their strife; I, who owns them both, has to deal with a new kind of stress, And I only care less, because in their desire to love her forever, the heart will beat endlessly and the mind will think of her ceaselessly, While I collate the extract of their feelings about her, and I live everyday in her thoughts fearlessly, And the mystery grows deeper, that who loves who, they love her, I love her too, and they know, But without them I cannot love her, and without me they cannot exist, this is a reality we all know, However, the desire to love someone so beautiful has made them my foe, and my willingness to keep living for her, Has encouraged them to exploit my weakness, that to always live loving her, As long as the heart beats, the mind doesn't mind, and as long as my mind only her thoughts creates, I too do not mind, Living in a body, where my own heart only beats for her, my mind only thinks about her, while I am busy living for her with feelings well defined, CONTINUED IN PART II.........

For all the monsters who are still waiting to be loved. Of course, my faith was tested. Isn't that always the way? The trouble with people is that unlike gods or bodhisattvas, we are only mortals, and so destined to disappoint and even harm one another. It wasn't just my world that was falling apart. It was everyone's. So I wrote. I wrote as though I might be casting a spell or chanting a religious litany. I wrote as though poetry and prayer might mean the same thing, as if words might reconnect me with what I once considered my unshakable relationship with the human divine. I wrote to summon the language that might help me fall back in love with being human. I wrote my way through the question: What happens when we imagine loving the people-and the parts of ourselves-that we do not believe are worthy of love? What emerged was a series of love letters to unexpected people and places, to the parts of the world and my own self that I thought were beyond saving. Yes, dear reader. This is a book of love letters- to dead people, to exes, to prostitutes and johns. Love letters to weirdos and monsters, to transphobes and racists, to everyone and everything I have ever had trouble holding in my heart. I needed to know that I could love them, because that meant I could still love myself- as hopeless and lost as I had become. From the depths of my rage and despair, I needed to find my way back to love. This book is my act of prayer in a collapsing world. My devotion to the belief that we are all intrinsically sacred. My bridge back to hope.

More to life than king and country, More to love than crumpet and nookie. Rise above all mindless swag, Break the spell of heartless shag, Life begins outside the vault of vanity.

The truths of the one subject have already been discovered, but have not been accepted because they spell the death of the faith in the lie.

A mind persuaded that it lives among things that, like words, are essentially significant, and that what they signify is the magic attraction, called love, which draws all things after it, is a mind poetic in its intuition, even if its language be prose. The science and philosophy of Dante did not have to be put into verse in order to become poetry: they were poetry fundamentally and in their essence. When Plato and Aristotle, following the momentous precept of Socrates, decreed that observation of nature should stop and a moral interpretation of nature should begin, they launched into the world a new mythology, to take the place of the Homeric one which was losing its authority. The power the poets had lost of producing illusion was possessed by these philosophers in a high degree; and no one was ever more thoroughly under their spell than Dante. He became to Platonism and Christianity what Homer had been to Paganism; and if Platonism and Christianity, like Paganism, should ever cease to be defended scientifically, Dante will keep the poetry and wisdom of them alive; and it is safe to say that later generations will envy more than they will despise his philosophy. When the absurd controversies and factious passions that in some measure obscure the nature of this system have completely passed away, no one will think of reproaching Dante with his bad science, and bad history, and minute theology. These will not seem blemishes in his poetry, but integral parts of it.

There once was a girl of the Moth Folk, dark-winged, strong, and fearless. Her eyes were like the starlit sky; her footfall soft as shadow. And although she was lovely, love had no place in her heart, for hers was the tribe of the Moth King, who had waged a war on love, for ever and ever. But love, like all forbidden things, was fascinating to her. Every night of the clear full moon, she would go to the Moonlight Market and watch the traders sell their wares: printed books of every kind; pomegranates of the south; wines from the islands; gems from the north; flowers that bloomed only once in their lives. But she only had eyes for the sellers of charms and glamours. Here, there were spells for a broken heart, or to spin dead leaves into gold, or to rekindle a memory, or to summon the western wind. Most of all, there were love spells: tiny bottles of colored glass with stoppers worked in silver filled with potions made from the heart of a rose, or the tail fin of a mermaid. Here were glamours to melt a lover's heart: candles of every color; tokens of remembrance; silk-bound books of poetry. But among all the love-knots and bonbons and pressed flowers and handkerchiefs, the Moth girl never truly saw the nature of her enemy, for it seemed to her that Love was weak, and simpering, and faithless. She told herself she was too strong to fall for its blandishments. Until one day, at the Market, she saw a boy with a glamorie-glass in his hand, standing by a display of books, and stories, and legends, and memories.

Hero worship, when properly entered into, has a great deal of poetry in it. It inspires and motivates, renews and revives. It encourages introspection, investigation of desire, personal moral inventory and all manner of fruitful examinations. The cargo of goodwill that spells of extreme admiration create, can provide personal ballast against discouragement and grief. To be in the habit of fixing another with your highest personal regard over time increases your capacity to love. . . . Hero worship can be an emotional Olympics, a way of testing one’s lowest and highest drives. My Judy-love strengthens and inspires what is already good in me and what is bad. It helps me become more completely and entirely myself. And if the poetry of hero worship imparts some measure of heroism on the practitioner, then that is all to the good.

More than twenty years later I meet Muriel at a poetry reading at a women’s coffee-house in New York. Her voice is still soft, but her great brown eyes are not. I tell her, “I am writing an unfolding of my life and loves.” “Just make sure you tell the truth about me,” she says.

It felt like an escape But no matter how I felt You were caught Under another spell

Love's Great Adventure by Stewart Stafford Look out for the wandering eye, And the fervour that follows it, A jewel clasped is the first part, Guarding against theft is trickier. Surreptitious teases acted out then, The Rubicon crossed and drained, Love, blind to impediment boundaries, Prized contagion spread as lightning. Rival houses intrude to spoil it, To still the fluttering of butterflies, And the bosom of Eros heaving, Unstoppable to every homo sapien. Here, I'll act as Cupid's emissary, Whisper lovers' spells in my ear, I'll parrot them to her to the letter, So lured, she'll have me over you. Groggy from humid moon nectar, On summertime clouded visions, A second an hour, as a day a year, Arousal of fire in swelled chests. Stallions of the Venus chariot, Borne freely to the new Arcadia, Feet skimming over terra firma, The youthful mask smothers all. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

In vain you whisper sweet lies About falling under love’s spell, Your stubborn and hungry eyes, - I’m afraid, I know them too well!

„Mum, how do I spell home?“ - „With your heart, my dear.

If you have money, you will have power: “Greater the money, greater the power.” Vice versa, with power you’ll have money: “Greater the power, greater the money.” Power and money are movers of life; without them life is but a spell of gripes. Let’s seek them, not just for the love of self; good for all if, too, for the love to help!

Women love poets. I guess it's the words we write that create a spell on women!

Poem for Vows Hello beautiful talented dark semi-optimists of June, from far off I send my hopes Brooklyn is sunny, and the ghost of Whitman who loved everyone is there to see you say what can never be said, something like partly I promise my whole life to try to figure out what it means to stand facing you under a tree, and partly no matter how angry I get I will always remember we met before we were born, it was in a village, someone had just cast a spell, it was in the park, snow everywhere, we were slipping and laughing, at last we knew the green secret, we were sea turtles swimming a long time together without needing to breathe, we were two hungry owls silently hunting night, our terrible claws, I don’t want to sound like I know, I’m just one who worries all night about people in a lab watching a storm in a glass terrarium perform lethal ubiquity, tiny black clouds make the final ideogram above miniature lands exactly resembling ours, what is happening happens again, they cannot stop it, they take off their white coats, go outside, look up and wonder, only we who promise everything despite everything can tell them the solution, only we know.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.