Poetry I like for Valentines Day by Carol Ann Duffy

These flowers are from my garden taken with my macro lens to celebrate Valentines Day. 
If you read this post and no-one else gives you a valentine feel free to accept this one from me. 

Valentine Carol Ann Duffy

 Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here. 
It will blind you with tears 
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

Words Wide Night Carol Ann Duffy

Somewhere 
on the other side
of this wide night
and the distance
between us, 
I am thinking
 of you. 
The room
 is turning slowly 
away from the moon.
 This is pleasurable.
 Or shall I 
cross that 
out and say it is sad?
 In one of the tenses
 I singing 
an impossible song 
of desire 
that you cannot hear. 
 La lala la. 
See? 
I close my eyes 
and imagine
the dark hills 
I would have to cross
to reach you.
 For I am in love
 with you 
 and this is what
 it is like 
or what it is 
like in words.

Ship  Carol Ann Duffy

In the end,
it was nothing more
than the toy boat of a boy
on the local park’s lake,
where I walked with you.

But I knelt down
to watch it arrive,
its white sail shy
with amber light,
the late sun
bronzing the wave
that lifted it up,

my ship coming in
with its cargo of joy. 

Sung Carol Ann Duffy

Now only words in a rhyme,
no more than a name
on a stone,
and that well overgrown –
MAR-       -ORIS—;

and wind through a ruined croft,
the door an appalled mouth,
the window's eye put out;

hours and wishes and trysts
less than the shadows of clouds on grass,
ghosts that did dance, did dance…

and those who would gladly die for love lang deid-
a skull for a bonnie head-
and love itself a metaphor, rose, red.

If I Was Dead Carol Ann duffy

If I was dead,
and my bones adrift 
like dropped oars 
in the deep, turning earth; 

or drowned, 
and my skull 
a listening shell 
on the dark ocean bed; 

if I was dead, 
and my heart 
soft mulch 
for a red, red rose; 

or burned, 
and my body 
a fistful of grit, thrown 
in the face of the wind; 

if I was dead, 
and my eyes, 
blind at the roots of flowers, 
wept into nothing, 

I swear your love 
would raise me 
out of my grave, 
in my flesh and blood, 

like Lazarus; 
hungry for this, 
and this, and this, 
your living kiss.

Anne Hathaway Carol Ann Duffy

‘Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…’
(from Shakespeare’s will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love – 
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

War Photographer Carol Ann Duffy

In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black and white
from which his editor will pick out five or six 
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.

Creative Quote of the Week

Sometimes no matter how many eyelashes or dandelion seeds you blow, no matter how much of your heart you tear out and slap on your sleeve, it just ain't gonna happen.”
― Melissa Jensen, The Fine Art of Truth or Dare

  Love yourself and sign up for a creativity class with me. 
Mosaics, painting, sculpture class Monday to Wednesday mornings and afternoons
Weekends by arrangement subject to group bookings. 


Phone 07 3463435 
Email jkeen@clear.net.nz

Make some poetry and painting in my creativity classes.
 Studio open Monday to Wednesday and Friday mornings.
Open for groups by arrangement after hours and in weekends.