Free Love Poetry Out Loud by Robert Alden Rubin Page A

shaking in triumph their long green hair:
    They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
    My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
    My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
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    SOUND AND SILENCE
    Heavy metal rock ballads excepted, loud noises and harsh sounds aren’t generally associated with tender sentiments. Here are two poems in which the sound echoes the sense
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    Bad Dreams
    Dreams are often silent. Not this one. James Joyce gained fame as a novelist, but also published two little-known books of verse that are notable for their delicate evocation of sound and spirit. Listen to the sounds of the words in this poem from
Chamber Music
and to how they reflect the sounds of a nightmare
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    Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name
    Oscar Wilde, famed as a glib conversationalist and witty raconteur, writes in this poem about being struck dumb by love. With good reason. He had to keep his homosexuality “in the closet.” When he was publicly “outed.” he was put on trial under sensational circumstances, convicted, imprisoned, and ruined financially
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    Silentium Amoris =
The Silence of Love
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S ILENTIUM A MORIS
    Oscar Wilde
    A s often-times the too resplendent sun
    Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon
    Back to her sombre cave, ere she hath won
    A single ballad from the nightingale,
    So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail,
    And all my sweetest singing out of tune.
    And as at dawn across the level mead
    On wings impetuous some wind will come,
    And with its too harsh kisses break the reed
    Which was its only instrument of song,
    So me too stormy passions work my wrong,
    And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.
    But surely unto Thee mine eyes did show
    Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;
    Else it were better we should part, and go,
    Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,
    And I to nurse the barren memory
    Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.
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    FILLING IN THE BLANKS
    We need loving, which is not to say that we always get what we need. Searching for love can lead us into some ambiguous places — places that the word love hides from public view … places that may in fact contain nothing. Here are two poems about love and emptiness
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V ARIATIONS ON THE W ORD L OVE
    Margaret Atwood
    T his is a word we use to plug
    holes with. It’s the right size for those warm
    blanks in speech, for those red heart-
    shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
    like real hearts. Add lace
    and you can sell
    it. We insert it also in the one empty
    space on the printed form
    that comes with no instructions. There are whole
    magazines with not much in them
    but the word
love
, you can
    rub it all over your body and you
    can cook with it too. How do we know
    it isn’t what goes on at the cool
    debaucheries of slugs under damp
    pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
    seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
    among the lettuces, they shout it.
    Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
    their glittering knives in salute.
    Then there’s the two
    of us. This word
    is far too short for us, it has only
    four letters, too sparse
    to fill those deep bare
    vacuums between the stars
    that press on us with their deafness.
    It’s not love we don’t wish
    to fall into, but that fear.
    This word is not enough but it will
    have to do. It’s a single
    vowel in this metallic
    silence, a mouth that says
    O again and again in wonder
    and pain, a breath, a finger-
    grip on a cliffside. You can
    hold on or let go.
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    The Big O
    What choice have we except to try to love? That’s the question Margaret Atwood seems to be asking with this poem. The answers may be unsettling, but still she keeps trying
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    Deafness =
There’s no sound in a vacuum
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T AKING O FF M Y C LOTHES
    Carolyn Forché
    I take off my shirt, I show you.
    I shaved the hair out under my arms.
    I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair
    on my legs with