5 Poems You Need this Valentine’s Day
The 14th of February is upon us. Love it, or hate it we’ve got five poems to get you through the day, each one with a twist of its own. In no particular order, here are our 5 Poems for Valentine’s.
Giving up Smoking – Wendy Cope
There’s not a Shakespeare sonnet
Or a Beethoven quartet
That’s easier to like than you
Or harder to forget.
You think that sounds extravagant?
I haven’t finished yet —
I like you more than I would like
To have a cigarette.
Love in the Asylum – Dylan Thomas
A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds
Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds
Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.
She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies
She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.
And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.
You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life – Rebecca Hazelton
After Love – Maxine Kumin
Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.
These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.
Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.
The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar
and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.
Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when
the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self
lay lightly down, and slept.
Intimate Talking – Hollie McNish
HeadStuff is currently open for poetry submissions for our spring Poem of the Week series. We are also looking for submissions for our Poetry Week series to celebrate Poetry Day Ireland. The theme for Poetry Week submissions is ‘There Will Be Time.’ Submissions for both are open until 31st March 2020. Please check our guidelines before submitting.
