Love Poems by Women: An Anthology of Poetry from Around the World and Through the Ages

"Poem of the End"
by Marina Tsvetaeva

I catch a movement of his
lips, but he won't
speak--You don't love me?
-Yes, but in torment

drained and driven to death
(He looks round like an eagle)
-You call this home? It's
in the heart.-What literature!

For love is flesh, it is a
flower flooded with blood.
Did you think it was just a
little chat across a table

a snatched hour and back home agian
the way gentlemen and ladies
play at it? Either love is
-A shrine?

or else a scar.

A scar every servant and guest
can see (and I think silently:
love is a bow-string pulled
back to the point of breaking).

Love is a bond. That has snapped for
us our mouths and lives part
(I begged you not to put a
spell on me that holy hour

close on mountain heights of
passion memory is mist).
Yes, love is a matter of gifts
thrown in the fire, for nothing

The shell-fish crack of his mouth
is pale, no chance of a smile:
-Love is a large bed.
-Or else an empty gulf.

Now his fingers begin to
beat, no mountains
move. Love is-
Mine: yes
I understand. And so?

The drum beat of his fingers
grows (scaffold and square)
-Let's go, he says. For me, let's
die, would be easier.

Enough cheap stuff rhymes
like railway hotel rooms, so:
-love means life although
the ancients had a different
name.
-Well?

A scrap
of handkerchief in a fist
like a fish. Shall we go? How,
bullet rail poison

death anyway, choose: I make no
plans. A Roman, you
survey the men still alive
like an eagle:

say goodbye.

from Marina Tsvetaeva's "Poem of the End"

A scar every servant and guest
can see (and I think silently:
love is a bow-string pulled
back to the point of breaking).

Love is a bond. That has snapped for
us our mouths and lives part
(I begged you not to put a
spell on me that holy hour

close on mountain heights of
passion memory is mist).
Yes, love is a matter of gifts
thrown in the fire, for nothing

From JULIAN OF NORWICH by Kathleen Jamie

Canary that I am, caged and hung
from the eaves of the world
to trill your praise.

He will not come.
Poor bloodless hands, unclasp.
Stiffened stone-cold knees, bear me up.

(And yet, and yet, I am suspended
in his joy, huge and helpless
as the harvest moon in a summer sky.)

Susan Ludvigson

PARIS AUBADE

Breathing, the last possession
That counts, comes faster here, where
Time and our oldest obsessions

Make us more conscious—self-conscious. The air
Is completely polluted, of course, but haze
That descends on this city is like the fair