Vessels of Love: A Short Essay

POETRY SYDNEY are orchestrating a smart little project to coincide with Valentine’s Day this year (2021): poems on love, poems of love, from Sydney poets for Valentine's Day.

PS has asked a few poets to make video in which we recite a poem and to share our thoughts on the nature of love. I'm up on 11 February here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/176573987585638/?active_tab=discussion

Thanks to Angela Stretch, Michael Aitken, Richard James Allen and others for the project and the chance to be part of it.

Every poem worthy of the name is a love poem, really—being an enactment of love as a way of being—of love, in particular, for language, the gift of a life, all selves, all beings, for humanity (in its silliness and beauty and dignity) and the more than merely human world. Sometimes, too, a poem is a celebration of love for another. And so is this poem of mine.

And love, itself? Here’s what it’s not: it’s not a theory, it’s not a ploy, it’s not a play, it’s not a trade, it’s not a deal, it’s not a contract, it’s not a prayer, it’s not an answer. It may well be, however, a question. A question you live: how can I make my being here (with you) count; how can I help; how can I fashion something beautiful from what I have been given; how can I help each being be itself as well as it can?

Love is how we close the distances down, while keeping our mind and our heart open. Love is a profound generosity, a radical and uncompromising kindness, a stance of immaculate affection. It may be most of what we mean by the Divine, and poetry, the language of connection, is its idiom.