I was given a collection of classic love poems for Christmas and have been continually drawn to this short verse since:
The Marriage Ring
The ring, so worn as you behold,
So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:
The passion such it was to prove -
Worn with life's care, love yet was love.
George Crabbe
Sparkling glitter white
Startled deer avoids the path
Snowy tracks all mine
Only one who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. -T.S.Eliot
Readjustment
I thought there would be a grave beauty, a sunset splendour
In being the last of one's kind: a topmost moment as one watched
The huge wave curving over Atlantis, the shrouded barge
Turning away with wounded Arthur, or Ilium burning.
Now I see that, all along, I was assuming a posterity
Of gentle hearts: someone, however distant in the depths of time,
Who could pick up our signal, who could understand a story. There won't be.
Between the new Hembidae and us who are dying, already
There rises a barrier across which no voice can ever carry,
For devils are unmaking language. We must let that alone forever.
Uproot your loves, one by one, with care, from the future,
And trusting to no future, receive the massive thrust
And surge of the many-dimensional timeless rays converging
On this small, significant dew drop, the present that mirrors all.
CS Lewis
and we run because we like it through the broad bright land
This time the cat
has gone too far; she sidles back
across the lazy river
with a kingfisher.
You pin her to the floor, unlock
the trap of her jaw,
release the teeth,
unpick the four barbed feet, each paw
a presentation pad of claws.
The bird can walk;
you let it go, but in the morning
find it cornered, killed and opened.
Something blue, something bone,
something gold, something broken.
Simon Armitage
Fitness can't be stored. It must be earned over and over, indefinitely.