I write this at the end of Valentine’s Day. A day when Facebook, Twitter, and my email inbox tossed love poems toward me with all the romantic recklessness of winter running arms open toward spring.
What I noticed was not how they may or may not have illuminated the experience of love. What I noticed is how I was reminded of other poems, seemingly on other themes, seemingly more everyday, less full of exalted emotion and that the love poems did not contain more love than those.
Every poem is a love poem. Love is attention. Care. Concern. Sharing. Poems are the product of attention, care, concern, a deep desire to share and connect. They are full of the love of words and sound, the love of whatever has been so attentively observed as to become the subject of the poem. They are full of anger, frustration, pain and concern about changing or losing ourselves or our world, however small or large that might seem in the lines of a poem, just as much as they are full of both tiny and tremendous joys. All emotions springing from the love of (and often fear of loss of) something we treasure beyond the comprehension of reason.
A poem, spoken or written or chanted or sung, connects hearts. Human feelings to human feelings, however heavily couched in the cerebral or wrapped in the wildness of free-range wordplay.
Poems connect. Love is connection.
Every poem is a love poem.
Every poem is.
Love.
