Fireblossom Friday : Love

Hello dear Toads and fellow amphibians. To all of you who have stuck with this poem a day thang, good job!!! It isn't easy! So, now it's my turn--and my happy responsibility--to provide some inspiration for you for Day 12. 

This being my last proper Fireblossom Friday--I do still have one April prompt left, on Monday the 22nd--I want to go back to the stuff poetry is made of. It's all well and fine to write about anything from fruit salad to politics, but the great majority of topics--in my view--lend themselves better to prose than to poetry. When it comes to poetry, the Big Three dwarf all other subjects and the Big Three are--drum roll please--nature, love and death. Nature is very busy this time of year, so we'll leave her to her duties. Death, I salute you, you are, as a subject, a poetic behemoth. Our knowledge of mortality--our own and that of those around us--lends an urgency, a richness, and a great well of sorrow to life, and poets through the ages have embraced this, pondered it, tried to express its impact and meaning. But today, I am going to ask Death to have a seat, over there, and wait for another day.  Today we're about Love.

What can I say about Love? Poems have been written about every kind of love, and every emotion connected with it, from the giddy beginnings of romantic love, to the ruin and despair of losing love. Young love, mature love, sappy love, selfless love, familial love, star-crossed love, lost love, love for animals or home or country, all of these have been written about for centuries and still, the subject is never exhausted. 

So, how shall I pare down this tremendous subject for our purposes here today? Here's what we'll do: write about love for someone who does not know you love them. The guy at the music store, the gal in the apartment across the hall. That actor on the screen, that character in your novel. You can write about someone you actually know or know of, or you can imagine someone. You could complicate it. Maybe they're married, maybe there's an age difference, maybe you don't want to rearrange your life, but there they are, making your heart beat faster anyway. Above all, write POETRY. It needn't rhyme, it needn't have a formal construction. But it can't be prose. Give us the emotion and the nuance. Make us sigh or laugh. I leave you with the lyrics to a favorite love song of mine, by Joan Jett:

Crimson and Clover

Joan Jett & the Blackhearts

Ah, and I don't hardly know her
But I think I can love her
Crimson and clover

Ah, now when she comes walking over
Now I've been waiting to show her
Crimson and clover, over and over

Yeah ah, my mind's such a sweet thing
I want to do everything
What a beautiful feeling
Crimson and clover, over and over

Crimson and clover, over and over
Crimson and clover, over and over
Crimson and clover, over and over
Crimson and clover, over and over

Write, link, have fun!