Love
On a cold winter
can you find love at 3 AM,
or only the moon?
.
.
#love #winter #love #moon #haiku #poem #poetry #haiga #photo #davidebooker #november #Saturday #112925 #2025
Category Archives: love
“Love”
Filed under 2025, haiku, love, moon, photo, Photo by author, photo by David E. Booker, poem, poet, poetry, poetry by author, Poetry by David E. Booker
“Love”
Love
Love is the big fish /
that always gets away, but /
leaves tall tales to tell.
.
.
#love #fish #tall-tales #Beth #photo #haiku #poem #poetry #davidebooker #talltalestogo #august #monday #080822 #2022
Filed under 2022, haiku, love, photo, Photo by Beth Booker, poem, poetry, poetry by author, Poetry by David E. Booker, Uncategorized
Haiku and photo: “#Love”
#Love
Remind me why: love, /
I carry as the morning: /
wide, heavy, weightless.
.
.
#love #wide #morning #heavy #weightless #carry #poem #poetry #haiku #photo #davidebooker #oldnorthknoxville #january #saturday #011522 #2022
Filed under 2022, haiku, love, Old North Knoxville, photo, photo by David E. Booker, poetry, Poetry by David E. Booker
Writers and love
Happy Valentine’s Day
Novelists and writers:
Zora Neale Hurston: “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
James Baldwin: “Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
Novelist Iris Murdoch: “Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
Also: “People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is unlike the original.”
W. Somerset Maugham: “We are not the same person this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”
Ursula K. Le Guin: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” [Editor’s note: Is this what is meant by love being “kneady”?]
Andre Maurois: “A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.”
Norman Mailer: “Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.”
Psychological and religious thinkers
Some love advice, courtesy of psychologist James Hillman: “For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”
Words from a Buddhist about love: “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, but that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anyone, deserve your love and affection.”
Poets
A statement attributed to French poet Paul Valery. “Love is being stupid together,” he said. [Editor’s note: does that mean it is better than being stupid apart?]
Poet Pablo Neruda: “I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.”
Also: “Our love is like a well in the wilderness where time watches over the wandering lightning. Our sleep is a secret tunnel that leads to the scent of apples carried on the wind. When I hold you, I hold everything that is–swans, volcanoes, river rocks, maple trees drinking the fragrance of the moon, bread that the fire adores. In your life I see everything that lives.”
The words of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.”
Two final thoughts:
Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote this in Women Who Run With the Wolves. “The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead.”
And from The Simpsons‘ creator Matt Groening: “Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.”
The blathering idiot and falling
Love hurts
The blathering idiot didn’t have an answer when she asked him a week ago, and he didn’t have an answer now.
It had always been the woman who fell out of love with him or maybe had gotten fed up with him, had her fill, and walked away, saying she had fallen out of love with him.
He did wonder now if Xenia asking was because she had heard something Zoey, Xenia’s mother. Had said.
Was Zoey falling out of love with him?
If so, what was he supposed to do? In the past – though there were not many of them, there were a few – the woman had announced it after the fall had taken place, saying things like: “It’s not you, it’s me.” Or, “I think we should spend some time apart.” This type of announcement usually came after they had already been apart a month.
In other words, the fall had already taken place and his heart’s shins were the ones getting barked.
“I hear that when you fall in love, that can hurt too,” Xenia said. “Has that happened to you?”
They were sitting in an ice cream parlor, the leaves already falling, but the temperature staying up. At least it felt that way to him. She had come back to the subject she had started talking about last week, just before he took her back to Zoey. He liked spending time with Xenia. She usually didn’t judge him, or at least didn’t judge him too harshly.
He had to think about that, too. Had he fallen in love with Zoey or had they just sort of got along well enough to stay in each other’s company – at least some of the time?
The blathering idiot felt a sudden desire – a pang really – to call Zoey and say with as much force as he could muster, “I love you!” Blurt it out even before she said hello.
Yes, that’s what he would do. He wouldn’t think about it anymore: he’d just do it.
Right now.
He’d just do it: right now. In person!
He bolted up from the chair, knocking it over. “Come on.”
Xenia had not finished her sundae. She brought a spoon full of sundae up to her mouth, and said in a muffled voice: “Where?”
“You’ll see,” he said.
They walked west and as they got closer to the house Xenia lived in, she said, “It’s too early to take me home. Mom’s still studying.”
“This will only take a minute.”
“No,” Xenia said. “You don’t understand. Mom’s studying.”
The blathering idiot stopped outside the gate at the end of the sidewalk that led up to Zoey’s house.
He paused and looked at Xenia. She was frowning and he thought he saw some sweat on her forehead.
“Is she … ah … studying with somebody?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what exactly?”
Xenia looked away for a moment, then looked back at the blathering idiot.
“She … ah … told me not to tell you this.” Xenia shifted from one foot to the other. “But she’s sleeping.”
“Sleeping?”
“But you were asking me about falling in love and falling out of love.”
“Oh, that. That’s ’cause I sleep in a bunk bed and I keep falling out and hurting myself. I told Mom it’s because I keep having bad dreams. Mom says she can’t wait until I’m old enough to fall in love. Then, she says, I’ll really have bad dreams and hurt myself.”
Filed under blathering idiot, love, Story by author
Moon dreams
I gaze to the west.
A sign of light not yet done.
The moon dreams of you.
Filed under haiku, love, Moon dreams, poem, poetry by author
You
If desire were a moment,
I’d beg time to stand still
and I would fill it with memories of
You.
Filed under love, poem, poetry by author, You
The Devil’s Dictionary: Love and Marriage
Every now and then, it is good to revisit a classic, or even a curiosity from the past. The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce was originally published in newspaper installments from 1881 until 1906. You might be surprised how current many of the entries are.
For example, in this as Valentine’s Day approaches, here is a definition for the words Love and Marriage. The Old definitions are Bierce’s. The New definitions or comments are mine. From time to time, just as it was originally published, we will come back to The Devil’s Dictionary, for a look at it then and how it applies today. Click on Devil’s Dictionary in the tags below to bring up the other entries.
Old definition
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other aliments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making all, two.
New definition
Love, n. A state of insanity cured by death, taxes, divorce, children, or being told you have to. Being told you can’t only encourages it. You know you are under its influence when money is no object, but the object of your affection is. When hope has replaced reason, and longing is just one more step on the way to ecstasy, then it is love.
But remember, love and libido come from the same Latin root: libet, meaning “that is pleasing.” If love would only stop there, it might be okay, but it often does not, heading, instead, into marriage.
Marriage, n. Terminal state of love. An institutional condition at which point that which was pleasing no longer is. Especially so when defined by the state, and enshrined with all the solemnity the government can bestow.
Filed under Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary, humor, love, marriage, satire, Uncategorized
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