This week, in celebration of Valentine’s Day, I am very pleased to share with A Work Day in Hard Times readers some of the love poems written by Broadside Press authors.
Dudley Randall, founder and editor of Broadside Press, wrote often and beautifully of love. Some of his best known poems, such as “The Profile on the Pillow,” capture those fleeting moments when our beloveds are present to us in all of their perfection.
In “Anniversary Words” Randall captures a different face of love, one all-too present to our foibles and imperfections and, for that very reason, perhaps even more lovely.
“Anniversary Words”
You who have shared my scanty bread with me
and borne my carelessness and forgetfulness
with only occasional lack of tenderness,
who have long patiently endured my faculty
for genial neglect of practicality,
for forgetting the morning and the parting caress
and for leaving rooms in a great disorderliness
which when I entered were as neat as they could be,
despite the absent-mindedness of my ways
and the not seldom acerbity of your tone,
I sometimes catch a softness in your gaze
which tells me after all I am your own
and that you love me in no little way.
But I know it best by the things you never say.
Rosemary Weatherston, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Director, Women’s & Gender Studies Program
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture