Love Stories & Love Poetry Thread

[Doreen Peri]

In honor of St. Valentine whose story I never quite knew (if anybody would care to tell me why they made him a Saint and what his story is, I'd be grateful!) - in honor of celebrating LOVE, which I hope we all would do every day, but given that there is a holiday about celebrating Love.... let's post some Love Stories & Love Poetry here, OK?

Got any?

Love is grand! I LOVE love!

(I'll show you mine if you show me yours, ok? )

You go first!

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
Much Love to you!!

[e_dog]

love is
boundless as the sea
as juliet said (or was it romeo?)

and we
are a long, long way
from the shore

[Doreen Peri]

Love cannot be loaned
though I have known
a time or two when
it has begged to be
returned after its giving.

Love cannot be borrowed
like a book of verse
from off the shelf,
or forced into renewal
once its term expires.

Love is in and of itself
a gift which must be
nurtured for its living.

Love cannot be loaned
or borrowed;
Love is a hymn, inspired;
an offering of harmony
from heart's
angelic choirs.

[magicmystery]

The History of Saint Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day started in the time of the Roman Empire. In ancient Rome, February 14th was a holiday to honour Juno. Juno was the Queen of the Roman Gods and Goddesses. The Romans also knew her as the Goddess of women and marriage. The following day, February 15th, began the Feast of Lupercalia.

The lives of young boys and girls were strictly separate. However, one of the customs of the young people was name drawing. On the eve of the festival of Lupercalia the names of Roman girls were written on slips of paper and placed into jars. Each young man would draw a girl's name from the jar and would then be partners for the duration of the festival with the girl whom he chose. Sometimes the pairing of the children lasted an entire year, and often, they would fall in love and would later marry.

Under the rule of Emperor Claudius II Rome was involved in many bloody and unpopular campaigns. Claudius the Cruel was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his military leagues. He believed that the reason was that roman men did not want to leave their loves or families. As a result, Claudius cancelled all marriages and engagements in Rome. The good Saint Valentine was a priest at Rome in the days of Claudius II. He and Saint Marius aided the Christian martyrs and secretly married couples, and for this kind deed Saint Valentine was apprehended and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. He suffered martyrdom on the 14th day of February, about the year 270. At that time it was the custom in Rome, a very ancient custom, indeed, to celebrate in the month of February the Lupercalia, feasts in honour of a heathen god. On these occasions, amidst a variety of pagan ceremonies, the names of young women were placed in a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed.

The pastors of the early Christian Church in Rome endeavoured to do away with the pagan element in these feasts by substituting the names of saints for those of maidens. And as the Lupercalia began about the middle of February, the pastors appear to have chosen Saint Valentine's Day for the celebration of this new feaSt. So it seems that the custom of young men choosing maidens for valentines, or saints as patrons for the coming year, arose in this way.

For the entire story and other information, refer to the link below.
http://www.pictureframes.co.uk/pages/sa ... entine.htm

[Doreen Peri]

Hey, Sherry! Thanks much! Nice to see you again.

I knew there was something about the dude helping couples stay together or be together, despite some odds against them or something....

But I sure don't remember hearing about pulling names from a jar or a box!

That's GREAT!

Frankly, I think it would be a much better idea than how we do it now! I mean, think of it! We wouldn't have to look around for someone we're compatable with. We wouldn't have to be attracted to someone, only to find out it isn't going to work out, afterall!

It would be more like Christmas! A surprise! Some guy would pick a name of a gal and bingo! There you have it! What fun!

And we'd get to do it every year? Fantastic! A new name, a new surprise every year! .... lol

I'm trippin' on this idea. I LOVE it!

[Lightning Rod]

You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.--Shakespeare

[mousey1]

This will be a lovely thread for those blissfully in love to posteth in.

I shan't post here but shall post my own thread.
Reason being my poems might be a little on the macabre side, in a cornpoem sorta way. Corn, corn, mushy corn and bullshit. Ah, how sweet it is.

(I probably shouldn't use the word bullshit in a nice thread like this; but I feel I must, it fits my mooed.)

[Arcadia]

I wrote this poem years ago when I was very enamorada of someone. I called it INRAM and I post in in Litkicks in 2003 al azar in a thread that had started yabyum and in a reply to Baby2.
It´s someway funny to read it now and see it there but I felt great when I wrote it (great means not precisely happy).
Here it goes:


Hay un extraño vértigo:
un anclaje repentino
que vira rápido
y sin motivo
a tierras desconocidas y lejanas.


-Las palabras nunca alcanzaron
esas alturas
ni esas profundidades-


Poder remontarme
en ese viaje.
Alejarme,
detenerme,
hundirme,
perderme
y volverme a encontrar
en tus ojos.

[stilltrucking]

magicmystery

Thanks for the info,
the public schools in baltimore back in the forties had the custom boys draw one name from the girls box, girls draw a name from boys box of names. Everybody got a tleast one card, perfectly random and fair, every body got one card. I wonder if the custom still persists in schools.

I have been much enamoured of things Roman for forty years, How modern those historians and orators sound today. They could be speaking with the same voice from our newspapers today.

[magicmystery]

Arcadia, is this a proper translation to your poem?

I took some poetic liscense but here goes....

There is a strange vertigo:
a sudden anchorage
that turns fast and without reason
to unknown and distant earth.
(Drawing me there inexplicably)

Such words can never
do the feeling justice in those trips.
Soaring to such heights
and the flat spin of returning
to deep within the ground.

I am overwhelmed in these instances
Nothing can move me, stop me,
Burrow deep enough to find me.
I lose myself and then,
Find myself again in your eyes.

my Spanish is limited... so I hope I have conveyed the escense of your poem.... Sounds like being in love though....

Sherry

[magicmystery]

Stilltrucking, Roman life has been an interest of mine since I took Latin in highschool.... 25 years ago.... ever since then, I have been a kind of armchair historian, soaking up what I can in information when I came across it. It is good to know that there are others out there who share these interests.

[Doreen Peri]

First Love, First Lie, First Kiss, First Try

I was six years old in first grade or was I five in kindergarten? I was barely there to comprehend the difference between my skin and air. I was attempting to determine where I left off and the universe began. It was only months after I had ventured from the safety of the foyer to the porch.

My first lie.

"Did you go outside?," she asked. "No.," I said, the bookcase headboard of my bed stacked with get well greetings, me, on knees playing with care packages, all the others outside running loose, ponies, unsaddled, tricycle queens and jacks of hearts held to spokes by wooden clothes pins, metal bars about to spring the rig, all for the sound of ...........brrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmm...... burrrrrrummmmmm.

Sun rays teased me into the first lie, each arc of a prism meeting me eye-to-eye beneath a door and between blindslats. Prison couldn't hold me. I escaped. Six or five, barely alive enough to know the difference between spring and fall. Winter was my nemesis. I named myself buried beneath covers, wool, cotton, blends of color and fabric, trapped in shallow breath. I had spent summers in oxygen tents already while dance was being choreographed without my permission.

Love is often not a gentle thing.
Love can be too owned.

And so my mother claimed me in her prison. Dust could not be breathed. Every inch, each corner, every minute crevice needed clearing out. Debris would put me in a life-or-death demise and at my size, possibilities were most likely perilous. Just as an iris brings forth a pierce of iris leaves up through surface soil, a child is owned by limitations. Bulbs are made to break through barriers with stem, but then again, there is a certain timing to the bloom.

I told my first fib. I ventured out of the vestibule to breathe freedom. I should have told the truth. I should have said yes, I went. But I didn't.

It had to have been only months later. Age is something so relative, it's difficult to imagine the percentage when one year is all of a fifth or sixth of your entire live. Mathematics is relentless. I will never understand equations which cause a miniscule existence to become such a large percentage of a whole.

But all told, I weighed in with another few months and without much further ado or contemplation of do or die, I proceeded to public education.

Ok, so there we were like sitting around in the same class and all and we were making lists, no shit, lists! At six! Lists of who we liked and why. Which guys were hot and which were not and it was like way strange because they housed us in an alternative place because there was construction going on and all the buses had different routes than they used to when they first started out and changes like this were way big at six. Changes like this were huge to me, anyway, because the way the sun hit the pavement was different every day when I woke up and I knew then that the world was turning too quick for me to keep up.

I lived on Napier Street. There were only a few houses on the block. Ten, maybe, twelve, maybe fifteen. It's very easy to visualize it in my memory dream but I wouldn't want to be quoted when it came to actual history. Richard lived down the street. His father came out to help organize and referree kick-ball and softball and dogeball games, sometimes Greek Dodge. Richard's son apparently got hit by the dude that ran the miniature golf place a few miles down the road. The news shut it down. No more ferris wheels and loop-de-loops, no more paper mache games.

One block over was Olympus Street which was at an angle so steep I ran my bike into the big blue mailbox at the bottom of the street when a cocker spaniel came yapping and biting at my feet when I was like ten or so.

But that's going forward. Let's back up.

David lived on Olympus Street. I was six. He was six or seven or five. It's hard to remember all this stuff when I was barely alive enough to know where my skin ended and the universe started or the other way around and maybe I said this already. It's extremely difficult to remember everything but I do know that David had eyes that were the size of heaven and a heart that was a part of my soul! Both were baby blue with speckles of intrigue. Both were conceivable. Longed for.

Well, David and I were like really close friends in the small mind of a six-year-old which i had and I loved him more than naptime which was my favorite escape because of the blankets so easily placed just so far from each other so everyone was comfortable. Miss Nordeen gave us graham crackers and we had time to practice square dance and reel-to-reel. Yes, I know her name rhymes with mine now. I didn't plan that, though. It's all true.

David's eyes were so blue it was like I was looking at the sky of God when I looked into them.

And so one day when we were in between playtime and blankets of silence and boys were split into another category from girls so they could build stuff with blocks and we girls could cook stuff on make-believe stage sets, David found me in the hallway as I was trying to find my coat or my mother or my sneakers and he kissed me on the cheek and then......... on the lips. I melted on the linoleum, spread out in a doe-si-doe, ready to promenade.

This was my first try. I'll tell you what happened next.

A few months later, I rode home on the bus with David and Mary. Mary was my best friend. She was six like me. And David. I don't know what I did wrong. I don't know what provoked David to walk Mary home from school to her house right across the street from mine on Napier Street when he lived a whole block away on Olympus Street which was a steep street where I had wrecked my bike a few years later into the mailbox when the cocker spaniel yapped and bit at my heels which scared the livin' shit outa me and made me crawl into my music and pretend to practice piano every day for days and months on end, but damnit......

I'm so embarrased.

David walked her home and left me walking behind a few feet when he usually had walked me home every day all year even though he lived a block away and it was out of his way to do it but this time, he was walking Mary home and I got very upset and apparently, according to my mother who watched the entire thing out of the nineteen sixty living room picture window, I heard I hit David in the arm with my fist and screamed at Mary and said, "WHAT is going ON here? WHY are you walking HER home? What are you DOING? I don't UNDERSTAND!"

And then I went back inside, my first dealing with guilt right on the heels of my very first confrontation with what was truly my very first lie and then I went back inside both times and here I am still and y'know what? I don't miss David that much but he sure taught me a lesson.

First love, first kiss, first try, first lie or some kind of cycle like that.

What did he teach me? What's the lesson? You tell me, OK?
I would be happy to know any answer you'd say.

[stilltrucking]

I was attempting to determine where I left off and the universe began. It was only months after I had ventured from the safety of the foyer to the porch.

My first lie

.
Is that really your first lie?

Changes like this were huge to me, anyway, because the way the sun hit the pavement was different every day when I woke up and I knew then that the world was turning too quick for me to keep up.

TIME, if only we could yell Time, to stop the clock, a little time out like in those school yard games

First love, first kiss, first try, first lie or some kind of cycle like that.

I was talking to another college girl the other day about PG-13 not meaning what it used to, thank you for the peak inside those mysterious creatures called girls, I knew there had to be more to them then sugar and spice

What did he teach me? What's the lesson? You tell me, OK?
I would be happy to know any answer you'd say

Central Ave and Pratt Street
Wireman goes by that corner everyday
there was an elementary school there,
incrediblely next to the school was a scrap yard. We are talking shredded automobiles, crushed engine blocks, two story piles of steel rubble, with pieces avalanching down its sides when the electromagnetic cranes would drop more metal on top of it. Our school seperated from the scrap yard by a wire mesh fence, every once in a while a jagged piece of steel would slide under the fence,
strange memory of a boy's arm cut from elbow to wrist, me in the principle office, some vague guilt about what happened one of those moldy old memories whether true or not I suppose Kesey would say "it could have happened"

Kiss a girl in first grade, he must have been an alpha male for sure, for beta's like me it was just too spooky, I mean I remember I liked girls I liked talking to them, but I didn't have a clue about kissing, that was the farthest thing from my mind. my first kiss maybe 12 or 13, about the time I was sitting under a table thinking this is it. Like my nervous system was all of a sudden wired in and I could see the appearances of things as they are with an adult mind,
now that I am in my second childhood I can apprecitate it.

Doreen sorry for the ramble, this was terriffic, just a great pleasure to read

************************************************

Latin in highschool.... 25 years ago...

yes my latin rusty too, been forty six years since high school

ancient dead trees
still standing
home for rodents

[stilltrucking]

I loved him more than naptime

a girl can't love a man more than that, trying to come up with a good answer to your question, all I can think of is that stick cartoon where the guy is being pursued by aliens and needs some place tohide his penis, trying to think if I loved or thought about love or girls much,
There has been some interesting writting about childhood sexual curiosity, I can tell of my fears, for some reason the fears about sex stand out more than any warm fuzzy memories, Those Nums from st leo's i always crossed the street when I saw them. for some reason I remember a dream I had not sure of age, I would guess seven or eight, a sexual nightmare, a secrete underground hospital where boys were turned into girls.

ahh weird just weird, I have no idea what he was trying to teach, did he toy with your affections, christ six years old, I wonder how many men are all ready falling in love when they are six, I read somewhere that one out of every fifty thousand people is discended from Genghis Khan, doreen I think he was trying to teach you to be fruitfal and multiply

dam I just can't turnloose of this one, is this the first time I have seen this one?

[Doreen Peri]

Thanks, Still -

Yes, this is a first. I just wrote it last night. I appreciate your comments very much. Trying my hand at poetic prose . I'm thinking of becoming a storyteller. Then comes a novel. I might repost it in Snippets.

-d