Two Poems for Valentine’s Day

I am a huge poetry fan, so thought it would be nice to share two of my favourite love poems for the day that’s in it.

For me, love is the meaning of life and my reason for being. Romantic love is only one facet of the action and emotion of love, and I’m very grateful to have created a life centred on love, bolstered by fulfilling relationships with others and myself. I think about love every day, but it’s always nice to have any excuse to celebrate it!

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler I would ride your bed And leave the yellow bark dust On your pillow. Your breasts and shoulders would reek You could never walk through markets without the profession of my fingers floating over you. The blind would stumble certain of whom they approached though you might bathe under rain gutters, monsoon. Here on the upper thigh at this smooth pasture neighbour to you hair or the crease that cuts your back. This ankle. You will be known among strangers as the cinnamon peeler's wife. I could hardly glance at you before marriage never touch you --your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers. I buried my hands in saffron, disguised them over smoking tar, helped the honey gatherers... When we swam once I touched you in the water and our bodies remained free, you could hold me and be blind of smell. you climbed the bank and said this is how you touch other women the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter. And you searched your arms for the missing perfume and knew what good is it to be the lime burner's daughter left with no trace as if not spoken to in the act of love as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar. You touched your belly to my hands in the dry air and said I am the cinnamon Peeler's wife. Smell me.

To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am everclosed your legs to someone you loved openedthem for someone you didn’t moved againsta pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beachseaweed clinging to your ankles paidgood money for a bad haircut backed awayfrom a mirror that wanted to kill you bledinto the back seat for lack of a tamponif you swam across a river under rain sangusing a dildo for a microphone stayed upto watch the moon eat the sun entireripped out the stitches in your heartbecause why not if you think nothing &no one can / listen I love you joy is coming