Twenty Love Poems

and a song of despair

[20lovepoems]

“Autumn now - Colour everywhere in flames and flashes. All singing your name.”

I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.

― Charles Bukowski

[astronauted-deactivated20131123]

[20lovepoems]

“All of Time began when you first answered to the names your mother and father gave you.  Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.  Then, you can trade places with the wind.  Then you’ll remember your life As a book of candles, Each page read by the light of its own burning. ” 

— Li-Young Lee, from “Become Becoming,” in Behind My Eyes: Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008)

Happy Birthday.

[thestorycanresume]

[20lovepoems]

“We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.”

—  Hermann Hesse

You and I. Man and Woman. New York and Paris. 

[aseaofquotes]

[20lovepoems]

Robert Charles Wilson, Spin

[kingdomoftheballerino]

[20lovepoems]

"The whole concept of awards is silly. I cannot abide by the judgment of other people, because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don't."

- Woody Allen 

[adanvc]

[20lovepoems]

“When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction. You’re seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you’re worth.”

— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

[maggottsbecketts]

[20lovepoems]

venice. film photograph by courf-feyracs

I remember here. I recognized the spot almost immediately. We stopped here starving, discovered a surprising local Italian restaurant on the river bank, and had an incredible lobster pasta meal on that sunny summer day. Memories of such moments in a mortal life are immortal. 

[arcanja2]

[20lovepoems]

“All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.”

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1669)

[sinkling-deactivated20140526]

[20lovepoems]

“In your life, in your thoughts when you are alone, you are always addressing yourself to somebody.”

— Nadine Gordimer, from “The Art of Fiction No. 77,” The Paris Review (Summer 1983, No. 88)

[aseaofquotes]

[20lovepoems]

Pat Conroy, Beach Music

[20lovepoems]

“Only speak words that make souls stronger.”

— Ann Voskamp

[quietblue]

[20lovepoems]

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.”

— C.S. Lewis

[a-ppunti-blog]

[20lovepoems]

“Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Nice Quiet Place

[aseaofquotes]

[20lovepoems]

Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

[dappledwithshadow]

[20lovepoems]

“…the desire for love, the one  that costs everything, that shocks you  when someone else casts a shadow on the map  of the earth for the first time larger than your own.”

— Deborah Brown, from “Reprise”  in Walking the Dog’s Shadow (BOA Editions, 2011)

Drawing, Pablo Picasso, Lovers, 1904

[manundertheinfluence]

[20lovepoems]

“Love is most nearly itself  When here and now cease to matter.”

— T. S. Eliot, from “East Coker,” in Four Quartets (Harcourt, 1943)

And I am grateful for everything. 

[aseaofquotes]

[20lovepoems]

Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed