“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi

The Truly Great by Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

 

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

 

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

"I want to see what the sun/ sees before it tells/ the snow to go."

"The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.” W.B. Yeats

The Free World by Camille Rankine

I bind my old     grievances    
     to a helium balloon.      A long memory,    

I have been warned,
    is a curse.     Everywhere I go,      someone

has something      they must say      about you.
    Nobody knows     who we are.     Wouldn't you say,

nobody     agonizes like we do.    
     Elsewhere

is a promise     and a threat.
    I have been proscribed

compassion     of the wrong sort, and so
    I am alone.      I am

invisible within you.      Seeking companionship    
     I spend     my afternoons      before the windows

of pet shops and      strangers, trying
    to decide.      After all, I was told

I could have everything.
    I thought      this was meant to be

a romance:      I was delivered here
    in order to love you.

I was delivered here
    and ordered

to love you. If      we could be friends.
    I wore this new      dress for you. 

First Desires by C. K. Williams

It was like listening to the record of a symphony before you knew

            anything at all about the music,
what the instruments might sound like, look like, what portion of
             the orchestra each represented:
there were only volumes and velocities, thickenings and thin-
           nings, the winding cries of change
that seemed to touch within you, through your body, to be part of
           you and then apart from you.
And even when you'd learned the grainy timbre of the single
           violin, the ardent arpeggios of the horn,
when you tried again there were still uneases and confusions left,
           an ache, a sense of longing
that held you in chromatic dissonance, droning on beyond the
           dominant's resolve into the tonic,
as though there were a flaw of logic in the structure, or in (you
           knew it was more likely) you.

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ” ― Haruki Murakami