Good love poems can be as difficult to find as good love. Too often, even accomplished poets, take on the love poem head on with a fevered description of lust and passion, often to the detriment of their other work in a collection.
In her book, Ink for the Odd Cartography, Michele Battiste provides us with love poems filled with the details of life. some danger, and a dash of duende. Below, is one of the poems from that collection, Commitment , that I returned to several times in order to experience the dangers and delights of what commitment means.
Commitment
This church drowns, legs
kicking and churning eddies
at the altar, the sacristy filmed
with silt. I am not to mourn
here, my shoes ruined
with stickseed and blister
juice, my sorrow like milk-
weed forced from its pod.
The plane plummets, the car
crashes, the millet rusts
across the road. This side,
windrows are thinning
and wait to be baled
and the babies are impatient
underground, smacking
their fists at roots. Soil
shrivels in the autumn drought.
The Reverend Myrtle Tuttle
predicted gravel and a foul
moon. My love, one day
I will marry you, bend
to pick up blossoms
that drop from my crown.
I promise I will lose
the map of the cemetery,
a penciled circle marking
your collapsed mound.
Previously published in Mikrokosmos
About the Author:
Michele Battiste is the author of two books of poem: Ink for an Odd Cartography (2009) and Uprising (2013, forthcoming), both from Black Lawrence Press. She also has four chapbooks, the most recent of which is Lineage from Binge Press. She lives in Colorado where she raises money for corporations undoing corporate evil.
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