The Mailbox of Your Heart

Tags

Elaine Stirling, Father's Day poem, love poetry, sonnet

As much as I would like to tell you
in words how much you matter, that can
never be, because you’ve reinforced
the mailbox of your heart with a glue
no mortal can unstick. This life span
where we’ve overlapped will run its course,
and you’ll escape with me holding all
the letters I’d have written to you
with nowhere to post them, only here.
What you called shyness, I call big tall
fear of who I know you are. It’s true
that love shot full of holes smells like fear,
but wild sage will find a way to send
my message of love that never ends.

~~~

This little sonnet goes out
to all the sons and daughters,
brothers and sisters of the ones
who’ve decided to be hard to love.

Happy Father’s Day!

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
This gorgeous photograph of a rural mailbox is by Paul Ryan.

Proclamation

Tags

Elaine Stirling, elegy, feminine mythology, love poetry, sonnet

I love to be beautiful in alarming ways
through yes and yes again, the double positive,
I manifest from seedlings of desire, entire
catapulting possibilities. I’m always
at the front of every queue, aren’t you? More active
than I’ve ever been, I tune my words to lyrics
from the gold and silver ages. I’m magical—
that is to say, I still have wings. The colour of
my eyes depends on what I hear around me when
appearances, aspiring to be biblical,
crowd in. Indifference to the lie of painful love
stings only for an instant. Unprolonged and then,
that beauty I’ve been chasing shows herself through me,
takes hold of all my instruments, and I am free.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
Image of Minoan fresco comes from
http://www.linearbknossosmycenae.wordpress.com

In Love to Stay

Tags

Elaine Stirling, falling in love, free verse, light erotica, love poetry, new romance

A photograph of you
and me fell between
my knees on a beach
dropped by a waiter
with a piña colada
and a growl in his voice:
I was told to give you this.

I lifted the straw hat
off my face. I don’t
like sweet drinks.

Not this. That.
He pointed to
a place strangers
shouldn’t point.
I sat up.

The picture
was taken in
twenty-o-three
on the side of
a mountain,
Kelowna, B.C.

You were wearing
the smile that always
got you a second piece
of pie and not much else,
stretched across the
timothy, knee dropped
in front of majestic details
I used to love to sketch.

Me, I knelt behind you
with the slightly glazed
look of an auto-timed shot,
my bare arms spread:
Look what I caught!

A shadow fell
across me just as
I was starting to
compare my boobs
of then to now.

They’re perfect.
Always will be.

And I looked into
the face of you, ten
years on, the aqua crystal
ocean and your eyes
conspired from the same
divine, insoluble palette.

Your legs apart,
steeple-tall and lean,
I moved my gaze to
your belly hair that curls
when wet and tastes
of things to come.

I came by jet,
you said, soon
as I heard.

I knew then as
I’ve always known
I am in love to stay
in love with you.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

I Know a Love

Tags

abundance, Elaine Stirling, Law of Attraction, love poetry, new love, relationships, romance, sensuality, vibrational reality

I know a love
that doesn’t show
or force his hand
who lifts this weighted
heart to kiss as if
it were a hummingbird
then sets me down
to go my way,
a muscled love
that rises like the mist
across a mountain lake
and feeds the texture
of my dreams with vast
realities to which I wake
and find the evidence
beside me, ever-growing,
in the shape, the touch
and smile, thrust of you.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013