True Love
By Alec Rawls © 1998.

           True Love   (a sonnet*)


In many ways do men and women love:
With gentle tones where intimacy breeds
Or bold romance when obstacles impose.
As with the soil, love varies with the seeds:
From some may fondness grow without attraction,
Or if attraction, passion still may lack.
These may, like siblings, loving friends become,
Or spouses if no need does hold them back.
If one still yearns for his or her completion,
To press against a breast that fills one's own,
Then flights of life cast arrows yet to land
While loneness harks the fall from hidden stands.
There's just one law that I would write in stone:
   That what we mean by true love is the bliss
   To never want another love than this.**





*  Almost a sonnet. The third line of the third 
quatrain is replaced with a couplet, which seems 
to work. c.f. Paleontology, verse seven, for a 
variation on this scheme.

** "But what if someday I do want another love? 
Does that mean it wasn't true love before?" For 
people who are drawn, when faced with multiple 
possible meanings, to whatever meaning makes the 
least sense, this line could be clarified as: "To 
want to never want another love than this." But 
that wouldn't be poetry.

 

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Date Last Modified: 8/27/99
Copyright Alec Rawls © 1998