Yesterday, when I was perusing Unsplash looking for a featured image for the blog, my eye was caught by an image and I thought, Right! That is tomorrow’s poem’s title and theme. So, unusually, it had about twenty-four hours to simmer on the backburner of my brain. Despite – maybe even because of – the grim world news, it’s another love poem. It began it’s first draft in the waiting of my GP’s surgery too early this morning. Then it macerated a bit while I planted some more of the hundreds of spring bulbs my husband is planting in our garden this autumn. I burned some of the lunch while I redrafted it. (Thank heaven’s for smoke alarms.)
I Fell in Love With You Here
For Tony
Not to be glib, but it fills the bill –
a mattress on the floor in a house on Stamford Hill –
when I glimpsed my beauty in your eye.
But that would be half a lie.
I had already fallen into you
when I fiercely said, Choose me! –
settling a point we would no longer
debate or need to argue.
Maybe it was when you moodily considered
the Thames. (Or was it the River Lea?)
as you sat with your pint
pondering the problem of me.
The truth of the matter is
I fell in love with you
here and here and here –
in a new place every year.
In massive rows and make up spunk,
in an OR where you donned surgical bonnet
and held my hand hard.
I fell for you there. You didn’t funk.
Only just last week I was so moved
by your hands, laying lightly on the steering wheel,
or playing your guitar,
the strength and breadth in their span.
I rediscovered you recently
coming down a supermarket aisle
cradling loaves of bread. And
I melted at your smile
this weekend when I woke up
bewildered, with Halloween hair bedhead.
I fall in love with you
in the garden and proposing by the sea.
I fall in love with you impromptu
here and here and here.
I find a new place every year.
Copyright © Bee Smith 2018
Featured image by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash.com
This is a very touching poem. Wonderfully honest, uplifting. Thanks to Tony for being the inspiration for it.
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