I Fell In Love With You Here

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