During the month of February, I will be posting some of my favorite Love Poems.

One of the reasons I so enjoy Valentine’s Day is the excuse—as if we need one—to focus on Love in its many forms, not just the romantic. The Love Poems featured on HARVESTING LOVE in coming days will reflect the many-splendored forms of love. Enjoy!

Love Poem #1: SAINT FRANCIS AND THE SOW by Galway Kinnell

Our connection to the Source of Love within us is what feeds the flow of our love into the world. No amount of love yearned for or perceived as coming from outside us can fill what has never been empty. There is within each of us a vast and infinite reservoir of Love, fed by LOVE itself, the Creative Source of the Universe. We are, in fact, one with that Source.

We are each a wave in the body of the ocean—sometimes forgetting and living under the illusion that we are separate and alone. This poem by Galway Kinnell is an invitation to remember.

In his book, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart, Roger Housden writes about “Saint Francis and the Sow”:

“This is one of those poems that acts on me cell by cell…. Even the sorrow of those times when I have felt apart, unworthy, without any hand to guide me to the deeper memory of my own belonging, even this weight is gathered up by the lines of this poem and brought into the light of a compassionate regard. It is a blessing poem, full of that ancient power …”

SAINT FRANCIS AND THE SOW

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on the brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long perfect loveliness of sow.

If you have any favorite love poems, please email them to me and perhaps they will be posted as well.