The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
— Philip Larkin
being to timelessness as it’s to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land
(do lovers suffer? all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad? only their smallest joy’s
a universe emerging from a wish)
love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
—do lovers love? why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools, all’s well
— e.e. cummings
Whatever synapse-leaping chemical
triggers response—finger from the hot stove
or the memory of a friend twenty years
dead—would, if poured from a beaker,
eat a hole through pig-iron. Quicker
than rust but slower than the sheer
beam of laser, it’s searing, chimerical,
thorough; in many ways resembles love.
— Steve Kronen
