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davidkirk
Forum Admin
USA
456 Posts |
 Posted - January 29 2005 : 11:05:08 AM
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Gay and Lesbian Love Poetry for a Commitment Ceremony
This is the second most popular pages at GayRites.NET. We get so many requests for "More!" that we have added a new GLBT love-poem section to our bookstore: go to www.gayrites.net/astore.htm and select the "G&L Love Poems" category.
While you're visiting us, be sure to see our large selection of custom, semi-custom and mix and match gay and lesbian wedding-cake toppers at www.gayrites.net/toppers.htm.
Provided courtesy of Reverend Rebecca Armstrong (www.revreb.com)
I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself?
Will you travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other
as long as we live?
Walt Whitman
Toleration
Is it too much to ask
That I should be
Allowed to prove
God's gift of infinite variety
In human love?
I do not seek that
All should understand,
Much less forgive;
But surely heed man's
Commonsense command
"Live and let live"
And, if the Greatest Lover's
Mind divine
Further can move -
(Who had Himself all natures,
even mine,)
Love - and let love.
John Barford (1886-1935)
*** *** ***
Song of the Open Road
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
strong and content I travel the open road.
I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.
Comrade, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
Walt Whitman
*** *** ***
Love Poem by Rumi
"Lo, I am with you always" means
when you look for God
God is in the look of your eyes,
In the thought of looking,
Nearer to you than your self,
Or things that have happened to you.
The Moon
The full moon is inside of you.
There's no need to go outside.
A fig grows in the silence -
Let your speech become that fruit.
I need a mouth as wide as the sky
To say the nature of a True Person -
Language as large as longing.
The body is only a device
To calculate the astronomy of the spirit.
The truth is - God is speaking through this body.
Say yes -
Say, YES.
Jelaludin Rumi
*** *** ***
The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you,
not knowing how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere - They’re in each other all along!
Jelaludin Rumi
*** *** ***
Chance
Strange that a single white iris
Given carelessly one slumbering spring midnight
Should be the first of love,
Yet life is written so.
If it had been a rose
I might have smiled and pinned it to my dress:
We should have said Good Night casually
And never met again.
But the white iris!
It looked so infinitely pure
In the thin green moonlight.
A thousand little purple things
That had trembled about me through the young years
Floated into a shape I seem always to have known
That I suddenly called Love!
The faint touch of your long fingers on mine wakened me.
I saw that your tumbled hair was bright with flame,
That your eyes were sapphire souls with
hungry stars in them,
And your lips were too near not to be kissed.
Life crouches at the knees of Chance
And takes what falls to her.
Elsa Gidlow
*** *** ***
I write, Honora, on the sparkling sand!—
The envious waves forbid the trace to stay:
Honora's name again adorns the strand!
Again the waters bear their prize away!
So Nature wrote her charms upon thy face,
The cheek's light bloom, the lip's envermeil'd dye,
And every gay, and every witching grace,
That Youth's warm hours, and Beauty's stores supply.
But Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave,
Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm;
E'en Nature's self, so powerful, cannot save
Her own rich gifts from this o'erwhelming harm.
Love and the Muse can boast superior power,
Indelible the letters they shall frame;
They yield to no inevitable hour,
But will on lasting tablets write thy name
Anna Seward (18th century)
*** *** ***
It was deep April, and the morn
Shakespere was born;
The world was on us, pressing sore;
My love and I took hands and swore,
Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore,
To laugh and dream on Lethe's shore,
To sing to Charon in his boat,
Heartening the timid souls afloat;
Of judgement never to take heed,
But to those fast-locked souls to speed,
Whoe never from Apollo fled,
Who spent no hour among the dead;
Continually
With them to dwell,
Indifferent to heaven and hell.
Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper
*** *** ***
Constancy
I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower: in all kinds
My love is perfect, and in each she finds
Herself the goal: then why, intent to teaze
And rob her delicate spirit of its ease,
Hastes she to range me with inconstant minds?
If she should die, if I were left at large
On earth without her-I, on earth, the same
Quick mortal with a thousand cries, her spell
She fears would break. And I confront the charge
As sorrowing, and as careless of my fame
As Christ intact before the infidel.
Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper
*** *** ***
A Girl,
Her soul a deep-wave pearl
Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;
A face flowered for heart's ease,
A brow's grace soft as seas
Seen through faint forest-trees:
A mouth, the lips apart,
Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze
From her tempestuous heart.
Such: and our souls so knit,
I leave a page half-writ --
The work begun
Will be to heaven's conception done,
If she come to it.
Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper
*** *** ***
Absence
Sometimes I know the way
You walk, up over the bay;
It is a wind from that far sea
That blows the fragrance of your hair to me.
Or in this garden when the breeze
Touches my trees
To stir their dreaming shadows on the grass
I see you pass.
In sheltered beds, the heart of every rose
Serenely sleeps to-night. As shut as those
Your garded heart; as safe as they fomr the beat, beat
Of hooves that tread dropped roses in the street.
Turn never again
On these eyes blind with a wild rain
Your eyes; they were stars to me.--
There are things stars may not see.
But call, call, and though Christ stands
Still with scarred hands
Over my mouth, I must answer. So
I will come--He shall let me go!
Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper
*** *** ***
My Heart is Lame
My heart is lame with running after yours so fast
Such a long way,
Shall we walk slowly home, looking at all the things we passed
Perhaps to-day?
Home down the quiet evening roads under the quiet skies,
Not saying much,
You for a moment giving me your eyes
When you could bear my touch.
But not to-morrow. This has taken all my breath;
Then, though you look the same,
There may be something lovelier in Love's face in death
As your heart sees it, running back the way we came;
My heart is lame.
Charlotte Mew
*** *** ***
Decade
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
*** *** ***
In Excelsis
You -- you --
Your shadow is sunlight on a plate of silver;
Your footsteps, the seeding-place of lilies;
Your hands moving, a chime of bells across a windless air.
The movement of your hands is the long, golden running of light from a rising sun;
It is the hopping of birds upon a garden-path.
As the perfume of jonquils, you come forth in the morning.
Young horses are not more sudden than your thoughts,
Your words are bees about a pear-tree,
Your fancies are the gold-and-black striped wasps buzzing among red apples.
I drink your lips,
I eat the whiteness of your hands and feet.
My mouth is open,
As a new jar I am empty and open.
Like white water are you who fill the cup of my mouth,
Like a brook of water thronged with lilies.
You are frozen as the clouds,
You are far and sweet as the high clouds.
I dare to reach to you,
I dare to touch the rim of your brightness.
I leap beyond the winds,
I cry and shout,
For my throat is keen as is a sword
Sharpened on a hone of ivory.
My throat sings the joy of my eyes,
The rushing gladness of my love.
How has the rainbow fallen upon my heart?
How have I snared the seas to lie in my fingers
And caught the sky to be a cover for my head? How have you come to dwell with me,
Compassing me with the four circles of your mystic lightness,
So that I say "Glory! Glory!" and bow before you
As to a shrine?
Do I tease myself that morning is morning and a day after?
Do I think the air is a condescension,
The earth a politeness,
Heaven a boon deserving thanks?
So you -- air -- earth -- heaven --
I do not thank you,
I take you,
I live.
And those things which I say in consequence
Are rubies mortised in a gate of stone.
Amy Lowell
*** *** ***
You bound strong sandals on my feet,
You gave me bread and wine,
And sent me under sun and stars
For all the world was mine.
Oh, take the sandals off my feet,
You know not what you do;
For all the world is in your arms
My sun and stars are you.
Sara Teasdale (1911)
*** *** ***
Autumn Sonnet
If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange
(for love itself may need a time of sleep)
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure - if I can let you go.
May Sarton (1972)
*** *** ***
A friend calls us/ An old married couple
I flinch/ You don't mind
On rthe way home/ You ask why I got upset
We are something/ Like what she said
You say I say/ No
We aren't married
No one has blessed/ This union no one
Gave us kitcehn gadgets/ We bought our own blender
We built our common life/ In the space between the laws…
We walk easily/ Around our house
Into each other's language/ There is nothing
We cannot say together
Solid ground
Under our feet
We know this landscape
We have no choice
Of destination only the route
Is a mystery every day
A new map of the same territory
Alice Bloch
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David Kirk
Founder of GayRites
david@GayRites.net
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