First Love Story (Rumi)
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind I was, lovers don’t finally meet somewhere
they’re in each other all along
Sonnet 116 (William Shakespeare)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge of doom
If this be error and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved
Love One Another (Khalil Gibran)
Love one another, but make not a bond of love
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls
Love Is (Adrian Henri)
Love is…
Love is feeling cold in the back of vans
Love is a fan club with only two fans
Love is walking holding paint stained hands
Love is…
Love is fish and chips on winter nights
Love is blankets full of strange delights
Love is when you don’t put out the light
Love is…
Love is the presents in Christmas shops
Love is when you’re feeling Top of the Pops
Love is what happens when the music stops
Love is…
Love is white panties lying all forlorn
Love is pink nightdresses still slightly warm
Love is when you have to leave at dawn
Love is…
Love is you and love is me
Love is prison and love is free
Love’s what’s there when you are away from me
Love is…
A Drinking Song (W.B. Yeats)
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die
I lift the glass to my mouth
I look at you, and I sigh
One Hundred Love Sonnets (Pablo Neruda)
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire
I love you as one loves certain obscure things
secretly, between the shadow and the soul
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where
I love you directly without problems or pride
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love
except in this form in which I am not nor are you
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine
so close that your eyes close with my dreams
Be Patient (Rumi)
I have phrases and whole pages memorised
but nothing can be told of love
You must wait until you and I
are living together
In the conversation we’ll have
then, be patient then
I loved you first: but afterwards your love (Christina Rossetti)
I loved you first, but afterwards your love
Out soaring mine, sang such a loftier song
As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove
Which owes the other most? my love was long
And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong
I loved and guessed at you, you construed me
And loved me for what might or might not be
Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong
For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine’
With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done
For one is both and both are one in love
Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine’
Both have strength and both the length thereof
Both of us, of love which makes us one