Antoine de Saint-Exupery

For Jen and Michael

July 24, 2013

Photo by Mary Cyrus, Mary Cyrus Photography
In honor of our niece’s wedding, some quotes on love:

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

“Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
—Robert Heinlein

“Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.”
—Rose Franken
Congratulations, Jen and Michael!

Love

Where You Come From

February 13, 2013

Photo courtesy Chelsee Tysoe
 “You don't have to go looking for love when it's
where you come from.”—Werner Erhard

Love

Love Is...?

February 06, 2013

Love is a warm puppy...

For me, the most worthwhile poetry is that which reaches out and connects with a great number of people, and this one, by Joe Mills of North Carolina, does just that. Every parent gets questions like the one at the center of this poem. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

How You Know

How do you know if it’s love? she asks,
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not,
but I know this won’t help. I want to say
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare
or social security, but this won’t help either.
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth,
“when you still want to be with them
the next morning,” would involve too
many follow-up questions. The difficulty
with love, I want to say, is sometimes
you only know afterwards that it’s arrived
or left. Love is the elephant and we
are the blind mice unable to understand
the whole. I want to say love is this
desire to help even when I know I can’t,
just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars,
the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes,
fingernails, coconuts, or the other things
she has asked about over the years, all
those phenomena whose daily existence
seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head.
I don’t even know how to match my socks.
Go ask your mother. She laughs and says,
I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Joe Mills, whose most recent book of poetry is Love and Other Collisions, Press 53, 2010. Poem reprinted from Rattle, Vol. 16, no. 1, Summer 2010, by permission of Joe Mills and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

Love

Please Pass It Around

July 11, 2012


There are thousands upon thousands of poems about love, many of them using predictable words, predictable rhymes. Ho-hum. But here the Illinois poet Lisel Mueller talks about love in a totally fresh and new way, in terms of table salt. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

Love Like Salt

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1996) by permission of the author. Poem copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

Everyday adventures

Hidden Hearts

February 14, 2011

A few months ago, inspired by The Enchanted Earth blog, I had the bright idea to take pictures of heart shapes I found as I went through my daily life, blog about it and call it “Hidden Hearts.” Since then, how many heart photos did I take? Exactly zero. It seems I didn’t see heart shapes around me. Maybe my vision was faulty--I am terrible at those puzzles where you’re supposed to find the pictures within the picture, and not once have I ever seen the image embedded in one of those optical illusion posters. 

Still, I wasn’t quite ready to give up. Remembering this post, I decided to give it one last shot. I took my camera out into our yard. If I found some hearts, great. If not, I’d give up the idea and move on.

As I stepped out the back door, I realized there’s a heart shape hidden in our outdoor table and chair set.


That was OK, but what I really wanted was to find hearts in the natural world. And then I saw this one:


And this one:


And this one:


And this one:


(I also discovered a face in our grill controls:


...but that’s beside the point.)

Now that I was completely focused on them, it took me only a few minutes to find all of these. Well. Is there a take-away lesson? If you know me, of course there is: You find what you look for. Looking for good in others? You’ll find it. Expecting your feelings to be hurt? They will be.

Looking for love? It’s all around you.

Happy Valentine’s Day—may your life be filled with love.

Bonus heart: