The Poems

Once upon a time a young man fell in love with a young woman.  From the moment he saw her from afar, she captured his heart.  The young man made up his mind to win her heart to his.  He wasn't rich, so he couldn't impress her with lavish gifts.  The young man was a poet, though.  He had a gift of expressing deep emotion and white hot passion using words as his brush and canvass.  So he began pouring his heart into poems.  He worked hard over each theme, prayed over each word, brooded over each line and stanza.  And he sent the poems as gifts to the young woman.  Like great works of art, each poem conveyed his heart and his love for her.  Not just the words themselves, but the artistry of his calligraphy and the ornate nature of the page were things of rare beauty.   And his poetry won her heart, and they were married.

Years passed.  And the young man, now a mature man, continued to give his bride the gift of his poetry.  At every special day of their lives - birthdays, Christmas, their wedding anniversary - she waited with excited longing for the envelope he would hand her that contained his latest poetic expression of his love for her.  To see his carefully and lovingly chosen words, the flow of his pen, the artistry of the pages he created was life itself to the woman.  As the years went by she kept these written treasures in a special place in their home.  Sometimes, when her husband needed to be away for a time, she would open her cherished collection of her husband's poems.  She would reread them, pour over them, linger with them, and look longingly at them.  To see his poetry was to see his love for her.

More years passed.  The man and woman were now older.  She became ill one year, and a horrible thing happened as a result of her illness.  Slowly but steadily, the woman's eyesight faded.  Eventually, she was completely blind.  This devastated them both.  She could no longer see her husband's poetic works of art.  Her eyes could no longer linger over his masterful expressions of his heart and love.  The sight of the sweep of his hand and the artistry of each page became a dim memory.  For the man, the way he had first expressed loved her and the gift he regularly gave her had died.  This made them both very sad.

Yet one day, something important came to the man's awareness.  He realized that, as much as he loved to write and present artistically presented poetry to her, writing and giving the poems was never his objective.  His aim was to show his love for her.  The written poetry, as much as they both loved it, simply was a way to express that love.  It was like a tool in his toolbox or a brush for his pallate and canvass.  If he returned to his original purpose, he reasoned, he would find a way to continue gifting her with expressions of his love.

So the old man continued to write poems for his bride.  Instead of presenting the written page as a gift to her, he read each poem to her aloud.  Every birthday, every Christmas, every anniversary, he poured out the artistry of his love not with his pen, but with his voice.  And in his voice the man discovered a new artistic instrument.  And the woman discovered a new thing to cherish from her man; not just his words, but the sound of him delivering the words.

And so the poems went on, and the love with which the man first won the woman's heart continued, through the rest of their days together.

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.