Day 2 brings me to my favorite poem regarding love: “Not Love Perhaps” by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond. I love that the love described in this poem (and despite the title, i think it surely is love) can be applied to so many kinds of love—lovers, family, friends, math, medicine, words—you get the idea 😉 To me this love is more real than the kind of love often seen in films and just as lovely.

“Not Love Perhaps” by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond.

This is not Love, perhaps,
Love that lays down its life,
that many waters cannot quench,
nor the floods drown,
But something written in lighter ink,
said in a lower tone, something, perhaps, especially our own.

A need, at times, to be together and talk,
And then the finding we can walk
More firmly through dark narrow places,
And meet more easily nightmare faces;
A need to reach out, sometimes, hand to hand,
And then find Earth less like an alien land;
A need for alliance to defeat
The whisperers at the corner of the street.

A need for inns on roads, islands in seas,
Halts for discoveries to be shared,
Maps checked, notes compared;
A need, at times, of each for each,
Direct as the need of throat and tongue for speech.

Then as a postscript, a poem in response to many of the posts yesterday. This is a poem about lost love—a lost friend. I love the softness of this poem, the sadness it captures. There are sometimes not enough words for a feeling so deep.

“Poem” by Langston Hughes

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.

Love, February