21 Best Valentine’s Day Poems
What better way to celebrate your love than by expressing it with heartfelt words—and besides, it’s also sort of all we’ve got with such limited options this year to celebrate. If you’re searching for a way to express yourself, why not borrow the words of some of the greatest masters of the English language. We’re talking about poets new and old, alive and dead, of course! Ahead, discover the 21 most moving Valentine’s day poems to read, share, and mull over this month and all year long because cupid never quits and affordable but meaningful gifts are the best. Send them to your lover, your parent or your child, your friends, or even just yourself (that’s right, Valentine’s Day is also about harnessing self-love!). Prepare for some major feels ahead.
You, rare as Georgia
snow. Falling
hard. Quick.
Candle shadow.
The cold
spell that catches
us by surprise.
The too-early blooms,
tricked, gardenias blown about,
circling wind. Green figs.
Nothing stays. I want
to watch you walk
the halls to the cold tile
bathroom—all
night, a lifetime.
Read the full poem and more by Kevin Young in Jelly Roll: A Blues.
You can tell by how he lists
to let her
kiss him, that the getting, as he gets it,
is good.
It’s good in the sweetly salty,
deeply thirsty way that a sea-fogged
rain is good after a summer-long bout
of inland drought.
And you know it
when you see it, don’t you? How it
drenches what’s dry, how the having
of it quenches.There is a grassy inlet
where your ocean meets your land, a slip
that needs a certain kind of vessel,
and
when that shapely skiff skims in at last,
trimmed bright, mast lightly flagging
left and right,
then the long, lush reeds
of your longing part, and soft against
the hull of that bent wood almost im-
perceptibly brushes a luscious hush
the heart heeds helplessly—
the hush
of the very good.
Read more poetry by Todd Boss at poetryfoundation.org.
After all, there’s no need
to say anything
at first. An orange, peeled
and quartered, flares
like a tulip on a wedge
wood plate
Anything can happen.
Outside the sun
has rolled up her rugs
and night strewn salt
across the sky. My heart
is humming a tune I haven’t heard in years!
Quiet’s cool flesh—let’s sniff and eat it.
There are ways
to make of the moment
a topiary
so the pleasure’s in
walking through.
Read more poetry by Rita Dove in Museum.
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky
Read more poetry by E.E. Cummings in E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962.
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian,
Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de
Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like
a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you,
partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips
around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take
on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there
can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary
when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are
drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing
through its spectacles…
Listen to Frank O’Hara read the full poem here.
Through your lens the sequoia swallowed me
like a dryad. The camera flashed & forgot.
I, on the other hand, must practice my absent-
mindedness, memory being awkward as a touch
that goes unloved. Lately your eyes have shut
down to a shade more durable than skin’s. I know you
love distance, how it smooths. You choose an aerial view,
the city angled to abstraction, while I go for the close
exposures: poorly-mounted countenances along Broadway,
the pigweed cracking each hardscrabble backlot.
It’s a matter of perspective: yours is to love me
from a block away & mine is to praise the grain-
iness that weaves expressively: your face.
Read more poems by Alice Fulton in Dance Script Electric Ballarina.
Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not
but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body
writes into your flesh
the poem
you make of me.
Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.
Read more in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.
… why shouldn’t
something
I have always
known be the
very best there
is. I love
you from my
childhood,
starting back
there when
one day was
just like the
rest, random
growth and
breezes, constant
love, a sand-
wich in the
middle of
day,
a tiny step
in the vastly
conventional
path of
the Sun. I
squint. I
wink. I
take the
ride.
Read the full poem in Not Me.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.
Listen to Ocean Vuong read the full poem in the New Yorker.
Loving you is like eating bread dipped in salt,
like waking feverish at night
and putting my mouth to the water faucet,
like opening a heavy unlabeled parcel
eagerly, happily, cautiously.
Loving you is like flying over the sea
for the first time, like feeling dusk settle
softly over Istanbul.
Loving you is like saying “I’m alive.”
Read more poetry by Nazim Hikmet in The American Poetry Review.
“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
Read the full poem and more by Mary Oliver in Swan.
Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile – the winds –
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight –
In thee!
Read more poetry by Emily Dickinson in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
I want to be your moonlit estuary
I want to be your day missing in February
I want to be your floating dock dairy
I want to be your pocket handkerchief
I want to be your mischief
I want to be your slow pitch
I want to be your fable without a moral
Under a table of black elm I want to be your Indiana morel
Casserole. Your drum roll. Your trompe l’oeil
I want to be your biscuits
I want to be your business
I want to be your beeswax
I want to be your milk money
I want to be your Texas Apiary honey
I want to be your Texas. Honey
Read the full poem on Open City.
Some people forget that love is
tucking you in and kissing you
“Good night”
no matter how young or old you are
Some people don’t remember that
love is
listening and laughing and asking
questions
no matter what your age
Few recognize that love is
commitment, responsibility
no fun at all
unless
Love is
You and me
Read the full poem and more by Nikki Giovanni in Love Poems.
Love is a fire that burns unseen,
a wound that aches yet isn’t felt,
an always discontent contentment,
a pain that rages without hurting,
a longing for nothing but to long,
a loneliness in the midst of people,
a never feeling pleased when pleased,
a passion that gains when lost in thought.
It’s being enslaved of your own free will;
it’s counting your defeat a victory;
it’s staying loyal to your killer.
But if it’s so self-contradictory,
how can Love, when Love chooses,
bring human hearts into sympathy?
Read more poetry by Luís Vaz de Camões in Rimas.
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Read more poetry by Maggie Smith in Waxwing.
Bring me your pain, love. Spread
it out like fine rugs, silk sashes,
warm eggs, cinnamon
and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me
the detail, the intricate embroidery
on the collar, tiny shell buttons,
the hem stitched the way you were taught,
pricking just a thread, almost invisible.
Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.
That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it,
cradling it on my tongue like the slick
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it
tenderly, as a great animal might
carry a small one in the private
cave of the mouth.
Read more poetry by Ellen Bass in Mules of Love.
You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of
quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport
terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each
of us looking out from the gorgeous
unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves
here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which,
this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this
moment, is another way of saying: You are who I
love You are who I love You and you and you
are who
Read the full poem at poetry.org.
… as long as i am a fact to you, death can do with me what she wants
•
my body, water, your body, a trail of hands carrying the river to the sea
•
i ink your name into my arm to fasten what is already there
•
i would love you even if you killed god
•
you made coming out feel like coming in from the storm
•
you are the country i bloody the hills for
•
you love me despite the history of my hands, their mangled confession…
•
at the end of the world, let there be you, my world
Read the full poem at poetryfoundation.org.
How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
Read the full poem in New and Selected Poems.
I lie on the ground.
I open my mouth.
I suck on a spoon.
I embrace a stone.
A beetle crawls by.
I empty my mind
I stuff it with grass
I’m green, I repeat.
The sun is a drink
the yellowest squash
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
I can’t get enough
Read the full poem at @poetryisnotaluxury.
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