Tag Archives: Valentine's Day

Valentine’s Day

3 Replies
Credit: Megan_Barling via Pixabay

This coming Tuesday it’s Valentine’s Day. Here is an early poem that hasn’t featured on the blog before. It was published in the Tees Valley Writer, Autumn 1995, and Highly Commended in their annual competition.

On the beach

Against the sinking sun gulls ride the waves.
Our dogs bark and chase their tails.
Try to run with a lone jogger who braves

the east wind whistling. Your son trails
in your wake, attempts big steps. Laughter peals:
a scene lifted straight from some fairy tale.

Heaped grey boulders mimic a colony of seals.
Not long before love winters in my heart.
I need to tell you how it feels

to be together, yet growing apart.
Your craggy face seems so much older
clouded in a bluish hue. I brace myself to start

as you place a hand on my shoulder
but all I can say is It’s getting colder.

Two cats on a Valentine’s card – poem

1 Reply
Credit: mihailfeciorunature on Piaxabay

A big ‘thank you’ to Ramona Herdman for today’s poem. It’s from her wonderful pamphlet A Warm and Snouting Thing published in 2019 by Emma Press. Ramona will be guest poet later this year, after her collection with Nine Arches Press has appeared in print.

Two cats on a Valentine’s card

For one bribed instant, they sat
in a heart shape: double-tail-curled
rumps the heart’s bumps,
heads close enough to bite.
You can see they don’t fool
each other an inch, don’t try.

This is one split-second’s flicker
in a ticker tape of sniff,
cuff, hiss, hysterical arching,
pantomime affront, huff off,
real pinching hate,
play-fight, indignant alliance.

Everyone in on this –
the animal-handler,
photographer, graphic artist,
printer, shop assistant –
knows it as cheap con, nothing
like the on and on of coupledom.

If you buy it, fool, do it
knowingly. Write I am the cat
who walks by himself. Some nights
I choose to curl close. That’s it. You want
my heart? OK. My heart’s
like that.