Tuesday 26 January 2010

MIDNIGHT COUNSEL



“Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

What causes us to fall in love? A vexed question, because logic has nothing to do it. It’s all emotions and hormones and first impressions, it’s our expectations and our wish to love and be loved in return. A confection of spun sugar, decorated with flowers and lit by starlight. It’s all twilight and sweet whisperings, a thousand joys shared and even its sorrows are sweet sorrows.

What causes us to fall out of love? Perhaps easier to answer, as logic has much to do with it. Love dies of routine and discovery of truths. Love dies when the veil of self-deception is lifted from our eyes, when we experience the other person as they really are… We may fall in love in the twinkling of an eye, in a split second, as a flash of lightning. We fall out of love gradually, slowly, over a long time, while we resist it with all our might.

A poem I wrote several years ago while pondering these questions.

Midnight Counsel


The midnight hours so short in sleep,
Endlessly drag on in sleeplessness.
My life behind me, needles me,
My life in front of me, daunts me.

The sheets so downy soft in dreams,
Are like sandpaper in wakefulness.
My thoughts of yesterday, wrestle with me,
My thoughts at midnight give me poor counsel.

Your soft and even breath in slumber,
Belies your alert belligerence.
My love in seasons past, strong and true
My love tomorrow, a dying species.

Jacqui BB hosts Poetry Wednesday, please visit her page for more poems!

3 comments:

  1. hmmmm, great questions your ponder in your poems.

    There is loving and being in love. I think IN LOVE is a rather transitory, overwhelming emotion that gets us to choose it over our single existence like a puppy's face lures us to take it home.

    As being IN LOVE wains (or nothing would get done in life) it should be replaced by loving - a more calm and less transitory emotion. I knew someone once that was so IN LOVE with being IN LOVE he moved constantly from one heady short term relationship to the next.

    Sorry I got you linked in late. I was late. Played to much yesterday.

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  2. This is beautiful and very wistful poem, Nicholas. I think it highlights what you say about falling in love and falling out of love. As Jacqui says above, being in love and loving are two entirely different things. How wonderful it is if when we fall out of love we continue loving...

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