Never love a poetTo love one is absurdA poets love entirelyBeing given to the wordBad poets write of loveA moral for my daughterGood poets love themselvesLike a fish loves water The didactic part comes nowNot of love and not of poetOf happiness and loving lifeThe poetry’s in how you show it!
Tag Archives: love
Warrior of Light – Issue no. 184 – The Sixth Cardinal Virtue: Courage
According to the dictionary: from the Latin cor: heart; firmness of spirit, energy before danger; intrepidness; cheerfulness; bravery; perseverance.
For Jesus Christ: You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost its savor, what shall it be salted with? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown away and trodden under the foot of men. You are the light of the world; a city that is et on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it gives light to all that are in the house. (Matthew 5:13-15)
In the heat of the fight: Yesterday I had the courage to fight. Today I shall have the courage to win. (Bernadette Devlin, Catholic political activist in Northern Ireland)
Among the priests in the desert: a group of monks from the monastery of Sceta — among them the great Abbot Nicerius — were walking in the Egyptian desert when a lion appeared before them. Terrified, they all began to run.
Years later, when Nicerius was on his death bed, one of the monks remarked:
“Abbot, do you remember the day we met the lion? That was the only time I saw you afraid.”
“But I was not afraid of the lion.”
“Then why did you run like all the rest of us?”
“I thought it better to run away from a lion one afternoon than to spend the rest of my life running away from vanity.”
In a speech: These great masses will have turned their backs on the grave insult to human dignity which described some as masters and others as servants, and transformed each into a predator whose survival depended on the destruction of the other. Thus shall we live, because we will have created a society which recognises that all people are born equal, with each entitled in equal measure to life, liberty, prosperity, human rights and good governance. Such a society should never allow again that there should be prisoners of conscience nor that any person’s human rights should be violated. (Nelson Mandela, who for 28 years was a prisoner of conscience, on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, 10/12/1993)
In the face of absolute evil: Two rabbis are trying by every possible means to bring spiritual comfort to Jews in Nazi Germany. For a whole year, though scared to death, they deceive the Gestapo (the secret police) and perform religious ceremonies in various communities.
They are finally arrested. One of them, terrified at what could happen from then on, does not stop praying. The other spends the whole day sleeping.
“Why do you sleep?” asks the fearful rabbi. “Aren’t you afraid? Don’t you realize what can happen to us?”
“I was afraid up to the moment we were arrested. Now that I’m imprisoned, what good does it do to be afraid? The time for fear is over; now it’s time for courage to face our fate.”
On a beach: What’s all around you? There’s no happiness, no courage, just terror on this beautiful sunset. The terror of being alone, the terror of the dark that fills the imagination with demons, the terror of doing something that isn’t in the handbook of good behavior, the terror of God’s judgment, the terror of men’s comments, the terror of risking and losing, the terror of winning and having to live with envy, the terror of loving and being rejected, the terror of asking for a raise, accepting an invitation, going to unknown places, not managing to speak a foreign language, not being able to impress others, growing old, dying, being noticed on account of your defects, not being noticed for your qualities, not being noticed either for your defects or qualities. (The Devil and Miss Prym, 1998)
According to a wise man: Courage is shown in acts, not in words; it is not bluffing, arrogance, or madness. A courageous man is the one who dares to do what he finds is right, and bears the consequences of his acts — whether they are political, social or individual.
A man can obey others for two reasons: for fear of being punished, or for love. Obedience that comes from love of others is a thousand times stronger than fear of punishment. (Mahatma Ghandi, 1869–1948)
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Warrior Of Light – The third cardinal virtue: Love
According to the dictionary: from the Latin amor: strong affection that drives us towards the object of our desires; inclination of the soul and heart; affection; passion; exclusive inclination; theological grace.
In the New Testament: So faith, hope and love endure. These are the great three, and the greatest of them is love. (Corinthians 13:13)
According to etymology: the Greeks had three words to designate love: Eros, Philos and Agape. Eros is the healthy love between two persons that justifies life and perpetuates the human race. Philos is the sentiment that we dedicate to our friends. Finally, Agape, which contains both Eros and Philos, goes far beyond “liking” someone. Agape is total love, the love that devours those who feel it. For Catholics, this was the love that Jesus felt for humanity, and it was so great that it shook the stars and changed the course of the history of men. Those who know and feel Agape realize that nothing else in this world has any importance, only loving.
For Oscar Wilde:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
(Ballad of Reading Jail, 1898)
In a late 19th century sermon: Pour your love generously on the poor, which is easy; and on the rich, who distrust everybody and cannot see the love that they so need. And on your neighbor — which is very difficult, because it is towards him that we are most selfish. Love. Never lose a chance to give joy to your neighbor, because you will be the first to benefit from this — even if nobody knows what you are doing. The world around you will become happier, and things will become easier for you.
I am in this world living the present. Any good thing that I can do, or any happiness that I can bring to others, please tell me. Don’t let me put things off or forget, because I shall never live this moment again. (Henry Drummond The Supreme Gift, [1851-1897])
In an e-mail received by the author: “While I kept my heart to myself, I never had a single morning of anguish or a single night of insomnia. Since I fell in love, my life has been a sequence of anguish, losses, confusion. I think that God, by using love, managed to hide hell in the middle of Paradise” (C.A., 23/11/2006)
For science: In the year 2000, researchers Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, of University College in London, located the areas of the brain activated by romantic love by using a series of students who claimed to be madly in love. In the first place, they concluded that the zones affected by the sentiment are far smaller than they had imagined, and are the same as those activated by stimuli of euphoria, such as in using cocaine, for example. Which led the authors to conclude that love is similar to the manifestation of physical dependence provoked by drugs.
Also using the same system of scanning the brain, scientist Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University, concludes that three characteristics of love (sex, romanticism and mutual dependence) stimulate different areas of the cortex, and further conclude that we can be in love with one person, want to make love to another, and live with a third.
For a poet: Love possesses nothing and does not want to be possessed, because it is enough in itself. It will make you grow, and then throw you on the ground. It will whip you so that you feel your impotence, it will shake you to rid you of all your impurities. It will crush you to leave you flexible.
And then it will toss you in the fire so that you can become the blessed bread to be served at God’s sacred feast (The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran [1883-1931])
(next Warrior of Light Online Wisdom)
The Dying Mother
It took a long time
For mother to die.
Everyone believed
She would go first,
With dad,
The last dirty-old-man,
Playing the field
Since he loved women.
Mother wore out the pages in her
Medical encyclopedia
To speed things up
On the highway
Of exotic diseases.
Before turning forty,
She had a hysterectomy
When cancer cells multiplied.
That didn’t help
Her state of mind.
Soon after that first surgery,
She left the Catholic Church
Becoming a Jehovah Witness
Getting ready to join God
Since death was eminent,
A heartbeat away.
After forty, a malignant tumor
The size of a grapefruit
Recruited an army in one her kidneys;
Like the Battle of the Bulge
During WWII,
That nasty Nazi,
A Hitler in disguise,
Was surrounded
And cut off from the rest of her body.
A rare encapsulated,
Parasitical alien life form without a visa
That the City of Hope’s doctors
Exorcised.
After Lola’s fiftieth, she asked
Her three children
What we wanted
From the house
Since death was close and
Father would outlive her to marry again.
I said, “I don’t want to talk about death.
Let’s take one day at a time
And enjoy what remains.”
My older sister and brother
Made out lists
Carting valuables home
Like picking flesh from
The carcass
While two hearts
Were still beating.
My dad died at seventy-nine
With a sour expression on his face
As he gasped his last.
The doctor told him,
“You quit smoking ten years too late.”
He was younger than her.
My brother took
Dad’s tools and the beloved Cadillac
Leaving it wrecked
Beside a road.
She cried a river of tears
After fifty-four years of marriage.
She missed dad.
I missed him too.
He was the quiet one
That listened.
Loneliness settled
Around mother like
A hot summer day
When it hurts to breathe
The scorched air
As one friend
After another
Left this earth
While she lived in that house
Alone in the desert
With her Bible
And five acres
Surrounded by a chain link fence
And sage brush
Two hundred miles from
My condo and job.
She told me once,
“In the mornings
Before I get out of bed
In this silent,
Empty house,
I forget how old I am.
I think I’m fourteen again,
But the mirror
Does not lie
And God
Is always nearby.”
At eighty-nine, cancer
Arrived one last time.
There was surgery
Removing the bleeding
Tumor in her intestines.
Mother lingered for
Two painful weeks
Screaming in agony,
Praying for an end to her story.
The call came during my
Fifth period English class
With students reading
The dramatic, tragic death scene
From Romeo and Juliet.
That day spelled an end
To more than one love story.
Sometimes death is a blessing.
I never told my students.
Let them find out
For themselves.
It’s better that way.
Warrior Of Light : Why women believe that we love them
In this case the title of the newsletter is not right. Since in the previous Warrior of Light Online I said refused to write about the reasons why men love woman (I would be considered a male chauvinist South-American writer who despises the liberation movement of the opposite sex), a reader called Julia decided to do it for me. So now we have the feminine version of why we love women. Of course, I don’t agree with everything, but this is a (relatively) free tribune. Let’s see what Julia has to tell us:
We men love women because they still feel they are adolescents even after they grow old.
Because they smile every time they pass a child.
Because they walk down the street erect, always looking straight ahead, never turning round to say thanks or return the smile or compliment we make when they pass by.
Because they are bold in bed, not because they have a perverse nature but because they want to please us.
Because they do everything necessary for the house to be tidy and perfect, and never expect any recognition for the work they have done.
Because they don’t read pornographic magazines.
Because they don’t complain about the sacrifices they make for the sake of the ideal of beauty, facing up to waxers, Botox injections and menacing machines in gyms.
Because they prefer to eat salads.
Because they draw and paint their faces with the same concentration as Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel.
Because if they want to know something about their own appearance, they ask other women and don’t bother us with this type of question.
Because they have their own ways of solving problems, which we never understand, and that makes us mad.
Because they feel compassion, and say “I love you” precisely when they are beginning to love us less, to make up for what we can feel and notice.
Because sometimes they complain about things that we feel too, such as colds and rheumatic pains, and then we understand that they are people just like us.
Because they write love stories.
Because while our armies invade other countries, they remain firm in their private and inexplicable war to put an end to all the cockroaches in the world.
Because they cry their eyes out when they hear the Rolling Stones singing “Angie”.
Because they are capable of going to work dressed like men, in their delicate little suits, whereas no man would ever dare go to work wearing a skirt.
Because in the movies — and only in the movies — they never take a shower before making love with their partners.
Because they always manage to find a convincing defect when we say that another woman is pretty, making us feel insecure about our taste.
Because they really take seriously everything that is happening in the private lives of celebrities.
Because they manage to fake orgasms with the same artistic quality as the most famous and talented of movie stars.
Because they just love exotic cocktails with different colors and delicate little ornaments, while we always have the same old whiskey.
Because they don’t waste hours thinking about how they are going to approach the pretty young man who has just come on the bus.
Because we came from them, will go back to them, and until that happens, live in orbit around the feminine body and soul.
And I would add: we men love them for being women. As simple as that.
My Baby Sisiter has Leukemia
The news declares a wreck on I-15
A three-alarm fire and impending storm
An Amber Alert shows a missing child
And my baby sister has leukemia
My daughter wants help with training a horse
My granddaughter needs a bedtime story
And hugs and kisses and tucked into bed
And my baby sister has leukemia
There are bills to pay and chores to do
I move as fast as I can but still can’t keep up
So many hats I must wear to make life work
And my baby sister has leukemia
So…the pace of life screeches to a halt
Soon, however, heartbreak fuels action
I lay myself down for a bone tissue test
And my baby sister has leukemia
De-iced, now What?
It was as if she were a comet,
then he,
then she,
on and on, orbiting
faster and faster,
first gathering ice, then burning
it away by veering close
to the sun.
First he,
then she,
then up for grabs.
Neither chose to be
a comet. Certainly
not a pair.
What, and be content
to find pieces of oneself
flying into ether
while others loosen
from their moorings?
Admit the stratosphere
made him tingle,
and her.
Hot what she wanted,
and he.
To fly at supersonic,
nay, supernatural,
speed.
If not melt and join,
come dangerously
close to touching
the untouched
in her,
in him.
Skin sloughs, tough.
Flew, didn’t we?
People gasped
as they looked up.
Now what little’s left
has hardened
or shattered, perhaps
beyond repair.
Ah, well, sighs,
she, sighs he,
got to feel
the high.
~~~~~~~~~~
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(c) Phyllis Jean Green, 2008
A l l Rights Reserved