Love and Holidays Manufactured from Feast Days

Here's one of those strange feast days, a feast day that's more popular in the general culture than it is in the church culture that pays attention to saints and their days. 

To me, this feast day has morphed into a festival that is essentially a manufactured holiday, yet another one, designed to make us feel like we must spend gobs and gobs of money to demonstrate our love.

Every day, ideally, should be Valentine's Day, a day in which we try to remind our loved ones how much we care--and not by buying flowers, dinners out, candy, and jewelry. The past two pandemic years should serve as stark reminder that we don't know how much time we have left to let the people we love know that we love them.

Valentine's Day is traditionally a good day for love poems, so let me post one here.  It's one of the ones I read in 2009, when I was chosen to read love poems at the Library of Congress.  I had to submit 5 poems; two of them could be mine, and three had to be from three other poets.  It was a lunch reading, free, and about 75 people came.  It was clear from the way that they were dressed that most of them were on their lunch break--lots of suits and professional outfits.  The event was near Valentine's Day, hence the love poem theme.

And now, soon, I may be back in D.C., living there for a year or two or three while I finish my MDiv degree at Wesley Theological Seminary.  Soon, I, too, can go enjoy poems on my lunch break.  I will leave the poem the way that it is, although the reference to my 15th wedding anniversary shocks me.  We will celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary this August.  That sentence, too, shocks me.  Am I really this old?  Am I really this lucky?

The Art of Marriage


I am tempted to say, as everyone says,
“Marriage is hard work.” And everyone leaves
the matter at that, as if all is explained.
Hard work—evokes factory lines and mind numbing
routine, which marriage can certainly be: the factory
work of the same old argument that a couple has at least once
a quarter, as dull and repetitive as bolting
part after part to automobile after automobile.

Thankfully, my marriage doesn’t involve
much of that kind of work. Some years, the work of marriage
breaks my back, like clearing land for a garden.
I lie awake and sweat out possible solutions
to our problems, how to keep the family fed
and sustained until the present trauma subsides.
And if I can endure the pain, the flowers
bloom beautifully, and our love feeds on fresh vegetables.

Too often, if I’m not careful, my marriage resembles
the kind of work most of my friends do.
They show up at an office, keep their seats warm
for the requisite hours, and claim their paychecks.
Nothing heartbreaking, but no passion either.
A companionable way to fill the hours.

At its best, marriage is an art form,
the musician bent over the instrument,
the artist splattered with paint,
the poet drunk with words.
I submerge myself in my art,
lose track of time, and look up to celebrate
my fifteenth anniversary.