Oh Grave Love
(originally written in 2014)
I am shocked at this grave love.
For one can not love as so,
As done by those who care not,
All but about their great love.
They, whose lives are lost to heart,
Roam, deep in Despair, the abyss.
No walls to claw up. No start.
No salvation nor any damnation.
I stand shocked at this grave love.
Still growing greater, deeper.
Alas! This affliction has no cure,
Like witchcraft, carried far by doves.
No wounds as their sleep is pure,
The heart has left its mortal glove.
Notes and Scribbles
The above is a sonnet I wrote a while back. It came to be rather randomly, as on one lost night I stumbled across an older sonnet. That one I was forced to write, my my A Level Literature teacher, for Valentine’s Day. Apparently, it was the best time to appreciate poetry written out of love and what better way to make a bunch of hyperactive and high-strung teens appreciate sonnets, by making them write them. As I was reading that, I’ll share that in a later post, I thought why not write an anti-sonnet. A love poem criticising the very idea of love it self? That’s what lead to “Oh Grave Love”.
Though, I must clarify what I mean by love. I do not mean the emotion. I mean the societal constructs that are romantic love and the expectation that all love between strangers should be romantic. Though it’s somewhat paradoxical of me to have written this because I tend to enjoy romantic dramas and rom-coms. However, life isn’t a rom-com and you don’t have to make it one.
As I continued to write poems, on lost nights, I realised that love was an underlying theme in many. The more I thought about it, the more this, the more it seems this is the opening chapter of a trilogy of poems, about love. I know it sounds contrived and a bit forced but I don’t plan my poems, they just show up on lost nights and I try to make sense of what would otherwise be ramblings and disjointed thoughts. It made the most sense to make this is a trilogy.
This is followed by “Free Fall” and the trilogy is concluded with “Gone”.