The Marriage-Lintels

Along the garden-backs’ high sandstone walls,

A carved slab, now and then – linked hearts, initials,

Year in spiky, eighteenth-century numbers –

Straddles a blind doorway. Each one remembers

Small hopeful fires that blazed like candles

Set in a window where love waits and calls.

Those lovers’ eyes have closed, candles blown-out,

But where they lived, love goes on taking root.

Hanging from stopped-up doorways, flowers with bells;

And currant’s pungent, vanished tom-cat-smells;

And common fumitory, smoke-of-the-earth,

Kindling thin yellow flames as on a hearth.

All but one wall, where the coal-tit’s note falls

And still falls as last May she watched warm holes

Fill with mortar while, on the ground, all pulled

Apart, the makings of her small fire cooled.

Anna Crowe (Skating Out of the House, Peterloo 1997)   

Thank you, Anna, for ‘giving’ us this lovely poem. The next one is about what we expect from Romance. a perfect rose

One Perfect Rose            Dorothy Parker

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.

All tenderly his messenger he chose;

Deep-hearted, pure , with scented dew still wet –

One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;

“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”

Love long has taken for its amulet

One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet

One perfect  limousine, do you suppose?

Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get

One perfect rose.