If Only I Can See You Again Poem

Ailbhe Darcy
What other words could there exist for what I felt, at thirteen or so, when I laid eyes on a certain "gilt, night boy", but Chimborazo, Cotopaxi? Sure, these words may at times have been arbitrarily attached to other, more mountainy objects, but here, in this verse form, they discover their true dwelling house.

I met my futurity husband at 19, and I wrote this poem in a notebook for him. By then it had already been echoing around inside me for years, telling me the truth about love. (Love is monomaniacal, dearest is appalling, love is secret, love is childish, love rips you from the bust of your family, love is woozy, love is ravishing, dearest is scrumdiddlyumptious.)

I should probably experience embarrassed at telling Ireland that this is my favourite honey poem, but am unabashed. There are many fine poems almost the grown-up parts of love, merely it'due south equally infatuated teenagers that nosotros learn romance, and equally infatuated teenagers that we practise romance, all the rest of our lives. I don't suppose a wedlock could amount to much if it didn't accept a pair of infatuated teenagers hidden in it.
Ailbhe Darcy'southward two collections are Imaginary Menagerie (2011) and Insistence (due May 2018), both with Bloodaxe

Romance
by WJ Turner
When I was merely thirteen or and then
I went into a golden state,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Took me by the hand.

My father died, my brother too,
They passed like fleeting dreams,
I stood where Popocatapetl
In the sunlight gleams.

I dimly heard the master's voice
And boys furthermost at play, –
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had stolen me away.

I walked in a smashing gilt dream
To and fro from school –
Shining Popocatapetl
The dusty streets did rule.

I walked habitation with a aureate night boy
And never a discussion I'd say,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had taken my speech away.

I gazed entranced upon his face
Fairer than any bloom—
O shining Popocatapetl
It was thy magic hr:

The houses, people, traffic seemed
Thin fading dreams past day;
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi,
They had stolen my soul abroad!

Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh
The Gaelic tradition doesn't indulge in the schmaltz of St Valentine. The searing, middle-twisting pain of separation is more commonly featured in Gaelic dearest verse, such as in the devastating lines of Dónal Óg:

Bhain tú thoir díom is bhain tú thiar díom,
Bhain tú an ghealach is bhain tú an ghrian díom,
Bhain tú an croí geal a bhí i mo chliabh díom,
Is is rí-mhór grand'fhaitíos gur bhain tú Dia díom.

For unadulterated sensuality, I refer you to any number of poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, although Fáilte bhéal na Sionna don iasc does end on a surprisingly tender note:

Is seinnim seoithín
do mo leannán
tonn ar thonn
leathrann ar leathrann,
mo thine ghealáin mar bhairlín thíos faoi
mo rogha a thoghas féin ón iasacht.
Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh'southward latest collection is The Coast Road (Gallery Press, 2016)

Theo Dorgan

She tells her dearest while half comatose
past Robert Graves
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As World turns in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snowfall.

I know of no curt poem in the English language that packs so much magic and memorability into so few lines, except perhaps for Betimes'due south masterpiece (mistress-slice?), the early 16th-century lyric known as Western Wind.

Both poems share a deceptive simplicity of diction and seductive cadency, the evocation of the natural earth every bit the proper theatre of honey, and an air of the mysterious – but the Graves lyric, I recall, reaches even farther and deeper into the psychic hinterland of besotted love than does the earlier poem. Information technology catches perfectly the trance of new love, perhaps love as yet undeclared, the dawning realisation implied in "half-words", the reticence and succulent hesitation of ane who right now, right here is discovering herself, or himself, new-fledged in love.

The shift in calibration that permits identification with the Earth turning towards rebirth in bound is brought perfectly dwelling in the poem's masterstroke, the repetition of "Despite the snow" and, even more, the pause of time in that amplifiying "falling". A perfect poem.
Theo Dorgan's latest collection is Ix Bright Shiners

Medbh McGuckian
When 1 was sugariness and twenty something , clutching at the harbinger of ane's virginity, information technology was Yeats's lessons in lovesex that hitting home, from "Brown penny, one cannot begin it besides soon," to the doting grandmother in When you are Old. Paul Muldoon's clever-clever Cuba focused on a Catholic family in the nuclear '60s subverting puritanical denials and frustrations with a gesture of tenderness. The girl in it does not escape, whereas in John Francis Waller's Victorian ballad, The Spinning Wheel Song, the maid Eileen woos her grandmother into drowsiness with her ain appreciating singing (all wrong according to the former woman), lulls her and leaps out in a bid for freedom to rove in the moonlight with her true love.

Being myself a protective grandmother at present, I heed learning this chant as a child of eight and being seduced past the patterns and interweaving tunes of the sounds,the piece of work concealing the lovemaking, the rhymes and inversions twisting the Irish out of the English.
Medbh McGuckian's latest drove is Love, the Magician (Arlen Business firm, 2018)

Enda Wyley
Some of the finest, most moving beloved poems in the world have grown out of desolation and isolation. And however, the right love poem is strangely reassuring. Someone else has felt like united states of america and has actually survived to write most it. Suddenly we know we are not alone. All of a sudden we can make the love poem our own. Here is a favourite, a unproblematic four line love lyric which I take ever admired. It aches with loneliness and longing and is short only unforgettable. That the poet is anonymous, adds further to the mystery of the piece written about 1530.

Western wind, when volition grand blow,
The small rain down tin rain?
Christ! If my dear were in my artillery,
And I in my bed again!

Enda Wyley's latest drove is Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems (2014)

Peter Sirr
When it comes to love poems I like to go back to the source of it all: the troubadours of southern France who kicked off the entire tradition of the lyric love poem as we know it, poets like Bernart de Ventadorn or Arnaut Daniel who inspired Dante so much he considered writing in Occitan. Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Marie de France, Gearóid Iarla, Yeats, Graves and everyone who writes under the sway of dearest today feels the hot breath of the troubadours on the backs of their necks. Some of the best of the poetry was written past women. Here's ane from the 13th century, past Beatriz, Countess of Dia, which I translated for a book I did chosen Sway: Versions of poems from the troubadour tradition.
Peter Sirr's latest collection is The Rooms (Gallery Press, 2014)

How I'd like him …
Estat ai en greu cossirier
How I'd like him
oh
how I would like him my
cavalier
even if for a single nighttime
naked in my arms
his head resting on my lap
I beloved him, more
than Floris loved Blanchflor

I did not tell him this

Everyone, everyone should know

To him I gave my heart my soul
my reason my eyes my life

My tender cute cavalier
when will I accept you for myself?
For i night merely
naked in your arms

If you could only have
my hubby's identify
and swear to me yous'll answer
when I call, and mind my desire.

Kevin Higgins
My favourite dearest verse form is Mayakovsky'due south Past one o'clock. It was written to his on-off lover Lily Brik. The lines "Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind. / Now you and I are quits" always get me because they were anything but "quits". In 1990 it was revealed Lily was NKVD agent 15073 and had been informing the authorities about his disillusionment with the authorities of that prissy Mr Stalin. The poem was left every bit a note when Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930. It appeals because, big eejit that I used to exist, I in one case had a trend to fall for the likes of Lily.
Kevin Higgins's latest collection is Vocal od Songs 2.0 (Salmon Poetry)

Vladimir Mayakovsky and his on-off lover Lily Brik

Past one o'clock
past Vladimir Mayakovsky (1930)
translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey
Past one o'clock. You lot must accept gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I'thou in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, equally they say, the incident is closed.
Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.
At present you lot and I are quits. Why bother and so
To balance common sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the heaven in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, 1 rises to address
The ages, history, and all cosmos.

Aifric Mac Aodha
For my starter, Seán Dunne'southward Letter to Lisbon because of where the "just" comes here: "to touch your sleeve at present/ would just exist enough".

And for my mains, M'anam do sgar riomsa a-raoir (My soul parted from me final dark) by Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh, who mourns his first love, a dazzler who diameter him 11 children and with whom the conversation only improved. The poem is specially good when his wife's empty couch-bed reminds him of improve times: "tárramair corp seada saor/ is folt claon, a leaba, id lár" (we have seen a tall noble class/ with waving tresses upon thee, O couch.) For all its cliches, that concluding one'due south a winner – it would stir the pulse and race the heart.
Aifric Mac Aodha's latest collection is Foreign News (Gallery Printing, 2017)

Louis de Paor
Every bit information technology gets harder to tell the ventriloquists and their dummies autonomously, it helps to remind myself I'g from the same identify as Jimmy Barry-Murphy, Rory Gallagher, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Patrick Galvin: no fake; no lie; no excuse. Ó Ríordáin said Galvin'south poems were "fíochmhar, neamhscrupallach, contúirteach" [fierce, unscrupulous, dangerous]. Technique is neither here nor there, he said: when you read Galvin's The Madwoman of Cork, nothing else exists. The aforementioned could be said of my favourite beloved poem, Plaisir D'Amour, where the mismatched couple are a perfect lucifer. Paddy said his female parent loved the verse form and his male parent hated it. Better again.
Louis de Paor's piece of work includes Agus Rud Eile De/And Some other Affair (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 2010)

Plaisir d'Flirtation
by Patrick Galvin

Bound
My father
Against the victories of age
Would non concede defeat
He dyed his hair
And when my mother called
He said he wasn't at that place.

My mother, too
Fought back confronting the years
Just in her Sun prayers
Apologised to God.
My father said in that location was no God
"And that one knows it to her painted toes"

My mother smiled.
She'd plucked her eyebrows too
And wore a come across-through skirt
With matching vest.
"He likes French knickers all-time," she said
"I'll have them blest."

My male parent raged.
He liked his women young, he said
And non half-dead.
He bought a second-hand guitar he couldn't play
And sang the only song he knew –
Plaisir d'Amour.

Summer
When summer came
My begetter left the house
He tied a ribbon in his hair
And wore a Kaftan apparel.
My mother watched him walking downwards the street
"He'll break his neck in that," she said –
"As if I intendance."

He toured the globe
And met a guru in Tibet.
"I've slept with women too," he wrote
"And they non half my age."
My mother threw his alphabetic character in the fire –
"The lying ghett – he couldn't climb the stairs
With all his years"

She burned her bra
And wrote with lipstick on a card –
"I've got two sailors in the business firm
From Martinique.
They've got your children's eyes."
My begetter didn't wait to answer that
He came back habitation.

And sitting by the burn down
He said he'd lied
He'd never slept with anyone but her.
My mother said she'd never lied herself –
She'd thrown the sailors out an hour before he came.
My father's heart would never be the same –
Plaisir d'Flirtation.

Autumn
Through fall days
My father felt the leaves
Burning in the corners of his mind.
My mother, who was younger by a year,
Looked immature and fair,
The sailors from the port of Martinique
Had kissed her cheek

He searched the business firm
And hidden in a trunk beneath the bed
My father plant his second-hand guitar.
He found her see-through skirt
With matching belong.
"You wore French knickers one time," he said
"I liked them all-time."

"I gave them all away," my female parent cried
"To sailors and to captains of the body of water.
I'grand not half-dead
I'm fit for any bed – including yours."
She wore a sailor'due south cap
And danced effectually the room
While begetter strummed his 2nd-hand guitar.

He made the bed,
He wore his Kaftan dress
A ribbon in his hair.
"I'll play information technology 1 more time," he said
"And you tin can sing."
She sang the only vocal they knew –
Plaisir d'Amour.

Wintertime
At sixty-four
My mother died
At sixty-five
My father.

Comment from a neighbour
Who was there:
"They'd pass for 20."
Plaisir d'Flirtation

Thomas McCarthy
Love possesses poets similar no other feeling. In recent years the dearest poem that has most startled me and moved me is Vona Groarke's heart-rending Ghost Poem from her Gallery Printing book X. That Ten could be an Ex. or 10 bad things that can happen to love. The poem is a reclamation of sensuous feelings, their ghostlike impressions and markings upon a lover'due south body. The skill with which Groarke layers those feelings is astonishing. Ghostly attachment makes "your life and mine/ that I fabricated up and lived inside". Anyone who has lost in beloved volition get this poem instantly.

Ghost Poem
past Vona Groarke
Crowded at my window tonight, your ghosts
volition have nothing to speak of but honey
though the long grass leading to my door
is parted neither by you leaving

nor by you coming here. The aforementioned ghosts
go on in with my blood, the way
a small proper noun says itself, over
and over, then i minute is cavernous

compared to the next, and I cannot locate
words plenty to tell yous your wrist
on my breast had the aforementioned two sounds to it.
You are a sky over narrow water

and the ghosts at my window
are a total day until I shed their loss.
I desire to tell you all their bone-white,
straight-line prophecies

but the thought of you, this and every night,
is your veins in silverpoint mapped
on my pare, your life on mine,
that I made up and lived within, as real,

and I find I cannot speak of honey
or any of its wind-torn ghosts to you lot
who promised warm sheets and a candle, lit,
but promised me in words.
Vona Groarke, X (Gallery Press)

Tom Paulin
To Lizbie Browne may seem an odd choice of a honey poem. I first encountered it in Dylan Thomas'south smashing reading on an EP which my English instructor, Eric Brown, played to u.s. in Belfast in the mid-sixties. Information technology haunted me and later on I came to run into it equally primal, obsessive, fifty-fifty fetishistic.

Partly, I responded to that "Aye" – "Aye", only with a hint of "ochone". The word has a intermission later on it and this prepares us for for the way the penultimate line pauses and so completes itself with "Beloved", which is emphatic and in a style centre-rending.

The 2 emphatic stresses on "Bay-cherry" tense the third stanza which softens into the Anglo-Saxon, slightly erotic, "flesh so fair".

The poem is witty and in "coaxed and defenseless" slightly sinister. Information technology succeeds in beingness both tender and self-mocking.
Tom Paulin's latest work is New Selected Poems (Faber, 2014)

To Lizbie Browne
I
Honey Lizbie Browne,
Where are you now?
In sun, in rain,? –
Or is your forehead
Past joy, past hurting,
Dear Lizbie Browne?

Ii
Sweet Lizbie Browne,
How yous could smiling,
How you could sing! -
How archly wile
In glance-giving,
Sugariness Lizbie Browne!

Iii
And, Lizbie Browne
Who else had hair
Bay-red as yours,
Or flesh so Fair
Bred out of doors,
Sugariness Lizbie Browne!

IV
When, Lizbie Browne
You had just begun
To be endeared
By stealth to one,
You disappeared
My Lizbie Browne!

V
Yes, Lizbie Browne,
So swift your life,
And mine and then boring,
You were a married woman
Ere I could show
Love, Lizbie Browne.

VI
Still, Lizbie Browne,
You lot won, they said,
The all-time of men
When you were wed ...
Where went you and so,
O Lizbie Browne?

Vii
Dear Lizbie Browne,
I should have thought,
'Girls ripen fast,'
And coaxed and caught
You ere you passed,
Dear Lizbie Browne!

VIII
But, Lizbie Browne,
I let you slip;
Shaped not a sign;
Touched never your lip
With lip of mine,
Lost Lizbie Browne!

Nine
So, Lizbie Browne,
When on a solar day
Men speak of me
As not, yous'll say
'And who was he?'
Aye, Lizbie Browne!

Elaine Feinstein

They Abscond From Me
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
They flee from me that old did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my bedroom.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my manus; and at present they range,
Busily seeking with a continual modify.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; just once in special,
In sparse array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me defenseless in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, "Dearest centre, how like you this?"
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a foreign manner of forsaking;
And I have get out to become of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

I've e'er loved this poem. You could argue it is unuitable for Valentine's Day, since Wyatt begins from his sense of rejection by the many women he has loved. He recalls them as wild creatures who once "stalked with naked foot inside my chamber" and were willing to "have bread at my hands" with the gentle sensuality a human might feel for a tamed animal. All the more amazing then to take him remembering one woman above all the others who throws off her clothes and takes sugariness command of a sexual come across. Few poems evoke more powerfully the strength and tenderness of physical love, yet much Wyatt goes on to blame his lover for her "newfangleness" in going her own mode.
Elaine Feinstein's latest collection is The Clinic Memory: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet)

Julia Copus
My husband, Andrew, read John Donne'southward The Skillful Morrow to me during our wedding and I managed not to cry, though it's one of my all-time favourite love poems. Some other is The Shampoo by Elizabeth Bishop, a poem about the robust permanence of dear; it ends with the speaker offering to launder her lover'south hair in a basin that is "dilapidated and shiny like the moon". But I want to single out Don Paterson'south timeless sonnet, Waking with Russell, most a new father waking in bed face to face up with his four-day-old son. At the mid-betoken of the poem, the speaker says he is mezzo del cammin – a quotation from Dante's Inferno pregnant "in the heart of the journey". The whole thing is exquisitely crafted (there are only two rhymes throughout, though people ordinarily don't observe on outset reading) but it's the emotional power that makes this such a bang-up dearest poem. And although it's written for a specific situation, that unexpected rediscovery of love in the centre of life's journey is something that resonates strongly with many readers.
Julia Copus'southward works include The World's Two Smallest Humans (Faber, 2012), shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Costa Poesy Award

Waking with Russell
Past Don Paterson
Whatever the difference is, information technology all began
the twenty-four hour period we woke upwardly face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him once again,
possessed him, till it would non fall or waver;
and I pitched dorsum not my old difficult-pressed smile
merely his ain grinning, or i I'd rediscovered.
Love son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the truthful path was as lost to me every bit ever
when y'all cutting in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true souvenir never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

Christopher Reid
So many love poems are concerned with the heady preliminaries: first glimpse, insurrection de foudre, wooing, and winning or losing; as well few celebrate what follows. Role of Plenty past Bernard Spencer (1909-63) is a bang-up, uxorious exception. The poet describes his wife (I have information technology) bringing food to the tabular array ("soup with its good / Tickling smell, or fry winking from the burn down") and placing tulips in a jug ("upright stems and leaves that you hear creak") in a manner that brings all the senses into harmony, hearing and odor no less than sight. He proceeds like a painter, coaxing coherence from disparate elements. The final stanza, in a risky gesture typical of Spencer, confounds both syntax and grammar to propose an uncontrolled blurting out of joy, a matrimonial ecstasy that obeys only its ain laws. I find this ingenious, profound and moving.
Christopher Reid won the 2009 Costa Book Award for A Handful

Office of Plenty
by Bernard Spencer
When she carries nutrient to the table and stoops downward
--Doing this out of love--and lays soup with its practiced
Tickling odor, or fry winking from the fire
And I look up, perhaps from a book I am reading
Or other work: at that place is an importance of beauty
Which can't be accounted for by at that place and and then,
And attacks me, but non separately from the welcome
Of the food, or the grace of her arms.

When she puts a sheaf of tulips in a jug
And pours in h2o and presses to one side
The upright stems and leaves that yous hear creak,
Or loosens them, or holds them upwardly to show me,
Then that I see the tangle of their necks and cups
With the curls of her pilus, and the torso they are held
Against, and the stalk of the pocket-size waist rising
And flowering in the shape of breasts;

Whether in the bringing of the flowers or of the food
She offers plenty, and is part of plenty,
And whether I see her stooping, or leaning with the flowers,
What she does is ages erstwhile, and she is not simply,
No, only lovely in that fashion.
(from Complete Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson, Bloodaxe, 2011)

John McAuliffe
I dear the way Thomas Wyatt, even when he is abandoned and has to admit, "They flee from me that some time did me seek", tin even so remember, or cannot forget, what has gotten him into such problem:

In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and minor;
Therewithall sweetly did me osculation
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"

I seem to get back to love poems whose pleasance is salted by something else, a feeling often found in poems I studied in translation, in Lorca, or the Old English Wulf and Eadwacer ("What was never bound is broken easily, / our song together.").

More recently, the love verse form seems to have emerged from the shadows again. The brilliant line-up of poets reading at the Cork International Poesy Festival this weekend features DA Powell whose rueful, heartsore poems include Abandonment Nether the Walnut Tree ("Practise whatsoever it is you'd like to do." he says "Exist quick.") and simply as adept on honey is his compatriot Carl Phillips, with his virtually deranged extension of want into everything he touches in poems like For it Felt Like Power,

Merely my favourite gimmicky love poem, which has something Wyatt-like, charged and mysterious about it, is Lavinia Greenlaw's Essex Kiss, which moves from detail,

A bear on as bold as rum and peppermint.

Chewing gum and whelks. A whiff
of diesel, crocus, cuckoo spit.

to

Your torso will requite way like grain,
your body will veer

smoke over a torched field
as the wind takes and turns it.

And a endmost couplet whose con and pro have their time to residuum and sink in:

Past this are nosotros bound.
No paperwork.

John McAuliffe's fourth book is The Way In (Gallery, 2015). He teaches poesy at the Academy of Manchester'due south Centre for New Writing

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Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/love-poems-for-one-night-only-naked-in-your-arms-14-poets-pick-their-favourites-1.3385035