Thank you all for sending in your love poems. From twenty five entries I have chosen my top five who will all receive a copy of Eggs on Toast by Jade Anouka, the latest pamphlet collection from Poetry Space newly released today.
Chiromancy
Like me you sometimes wake early in the dark,
thinking you have swum out of the sight of land.
Almost liquid, you roll onto your back to
marvel at the galaxy’s edge swimming into view
and mackerel through the sea of stars, the moon
for company, crescented half a boat away.
Sometimes, you float like this for days
lingering in some distant constellation.
Last night I watched Orion drift down your thighs,
Andromeda was still in your hair at breakfast
and that unexplained stigmata,
you tell everyone is the palm’s heart line,
was a comet’s track you scooped as
it burnt the water.
And as I lie in the dark,
tracing your palm
I feel perhaps this is how love begins
like fire on the water.
John Richardson
Lovers in the Window
Curtained by naked trees
branches screen the room
hung with lights, shining
apricots clothing the couple.
They move about unaware
that every move is seen
every touch tasted
as if they were sipped.
Sometimes he’s alone
preparing dinner
she appears in the light
and they eat together.
Today she’s alone
lifting the river of blond hair
arranges its stream as
she waits lit by a single branch
a lamp that mimics the sun
shines from the back wall
and he comes into the light
of the golden apricots.
Carolyn O’Connell
Olfactics
It was the smell that stopped
me, had me turning, looking
back for a second. Not the
heavy-scented gardenias or
the multi-coloured freesias
but the scent of something lost,
that race across the dunes, tremble
of thunder, abandoning the hope
of finding shelter, collapsing
helplessly with laughter.
Home. Building a fire,
peeling clothes, sips of whisky,
lips that find the sweet spot on my
neck and the quiet of your hands,
the very quiet of your hands.
Eileen Carney Hulme
Snapshot
A ray of sun
lights your youthful face.
You’re staring at the camera
perched on a rock ahead of us.
Your right arm encircles me,
encircles the child
swelling my womb.
When we return
to our London bedsit
there’ll be only one wage,
But on that beach, on that day,
our money worries drift away
on the ebbing tide
and hope is born.
I dare say seagulls were
screaming overhead
and I know it was chilly,
as we dared to dream
how our lives might pan out.
We could not have guessed
we’d be together for fifty-one years.
Di Coffey
Snowdrop
I give you the first flower of the year:
Conceived in the warm womb of earth
In winter when the nights were cold,
The thrushes no longer singing
And the sun low down and shrouded—
When snow lay thick upon the ground.
At first a swaddled bud, this snowdrop
Opens like a little star
And flaunts its green-frilled petticoats.
I give you the first flower of the year—
For you, my darling one, my dear.
Lizzie Ballagher
