April 3, 2008 #480
Dear Subscriber:
This week’s poem of the week is an anniversary poem.
You can hear me read the poem and listen to the music for it at my site by going to http://www.poemsforfree.com and clicking on "Poem of the Week."
You can post a comment on the poem or read other comments on it at http://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com. Please note, however, that comments will be moderated and that not all comments will appear in the blog.
Yours,
Nick Gordon
Happy sixteenth anniversary!
After all these years, still in love!
Perhaps not more or less, but differently,
Perhaps because we know what time has proved.
Years flow past our bit of riverside
Singing inconsolably of beauty.
In sympathy, we watch the boats go by,
Xeroxing our poems in praise of duty.
There is in home an antidote for time,
Even as love lasts beyond a life,
Each passion pressed into a paradigm
New realized in the grace of man and wife.
The love that lasts is stubborn, tough, and strong,
Having need to need, both plain and long.
2 comments:
this poem is nice and perplexing... perhaps "sixteen" is a very confusing age imagine not being able to really know if at this age one is a child or an adult...but "sweet"... heard of "Sweet Sixteen?"
Dear peachmelbacroft,
Glad you liked the poem, sorry you found it perplexing. The key here is that the poem is not a sixteenth birthday poem, but a sixteenth anniversary poem, so the couple is more like in their forties than sixteen.
In fact, the passage of many years is one of the themes of the poem (“After all these years, still in love!”). Because the couple knows “what time has proved,” that is, what happened, they love differently from the way that they did when they first were married, and everything lay before them.
The next part of the poem suggests that love is a way of overcoming time, as though the lovers were on the bank of the river of time watching everything go by them. Home is an antidote for time, transcending time, just as love lasts longer than life. The final couplet states the qualities of the kind of love that lasts.
I hope this is helpful.
Nick
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