A Valentine To My Wife

Accept, dear girl, this little token,
And if between the lines you seek,
You'll find the love I've often spoken�
The love my dying lips shall speak.

Our little ones are making merry
O'er am'rous ditties rhymed in jest,
But in these words (though awkward�very)
The genuine article's expressed.

You are as fair and sweet and tender,
Dear brown-eyed little sweetheart mine,
As when, a callow youth and slender,
I asked to be your Valentine.

What though these years of ours be fleeting?
What though the years of youth be flown?
I'll mock old Tempus with repeating,
"I love my love and her alone!"

And when I fall before his reaping,
And when my stuttering speech is dumb,
Think not my love is dead or sleeping,
But that it waits for you to come.

So take, dear love, this little token,
And if there speaks in any line
The sentiment I'd fain have spoken,
Say, will you kiss your Valentine?

Happiness Has Been Your Gift to Me

Happiness has been your gift to me
All these years of melody and pain,
Pleasure, hardship, wanton rhapsody,
Pure delight and hard, wind-driven rain.
Years do not add up to love and glory:
All things rest on non-things far more true.
No note is so sustained throughout our story;
Nothing but your love, and mine for you.
In our lives must always be confusion:
Very little lost in Time is clear.
Even so, the whirlwind's an illusion
Regarding the few things we hold most dear.
So you have chosen me, and in that choice
Alone I find my refuge and my voice.
Reality is made by our own will:
You made my world and hold me in it still.

Love Is Never Easy

Love is never easy, but
It turns life into song
.
There is no bit of circumstance
That love cannot transform.

There is no weary moment
Of anger or despair
That love cannot convert to grace
And render whole and fair.

How passionate the paradise
That comes from knowing well
That someone in your happiness
Finds pleasure for himself.

How sweet the gift of giving to
Someone who gives to you,
A selflessness that gives to self
More self than self is due.

With all the searing madness of
The world from day to day,
And all the dreary sadness that
No joy can take away,

There is one truth more beautiful
Than anyone can bear:
That two can trust that when they turn
They'll find the other there.