Valentine's Day 2006

(This was emailed to my dearest of friends for Valentine's Day)
You all know me as a helpless romantic incapable of checking my love at the door. Always happy to be in love, I find myself surprisingly at peace with being unattached this fine February the 14th. Yet my love still gushes forth. Just now as I walked back to my desk, touching the red pendant that hangs between the red collar of my red shirt, I banged my head against an open cupboard door. I chuckle to myself because on my mind is the beautiful man from the streetcar whom I made a point of sitting behind while returning home from my class last night. He was very tall, very thin, very dark-skinned and walked with a casual style. What struck me in particular were the two bags he carried which were full of some sort of recording equipment. Sound or picture - I could not decipher. He had placed them gently down on the seat to his side and kept them close. He gazed through the windows alert at the world around him. He must use the equipment to record this world. I was smitten. At one point he turned my way and smiled at me. My heart could have pounded through steel. You could argue that this is an unremarkable event. A fleeting blip of the connection of two human souls on a planet of billions…
(Check this out! http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop )
But I’d rather think it’s about our human capacity for love – a power that we can wield even in a world that sometimes feels ovewhelmed with conflict. Ok. Enough blather from me. I’ll leave you here with the words of a true poet who says it better than I ever could.
HAPPY LOVE DAY TO ALL OF YOU!

F. R. Scott
From: Events and Signals. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954.

A Grain of Rice

Such majestic rhythms, such tiny disturbances.
The rain of the monsoon falls, an inescapable treasure,
Hundreds of millions live
Only because of the certainty of this season,
The turn of the wind.

The frame of our human house rests on the motion
Of earth and of moon, the rise of continents,
Invasion of deserts, erosion of hills,
The capping of ice.

Today, while Europe tilted, drying the Baltic,
I read of a battle between brothers in anguish.
A flag moved a mile.

And today, from a curled leaf cocoon, in the course of its
rhythm,
I saw the break of a shell, the creation
Of a great Asian moth, radiant, fragile,
Incapable of not being born, and trembling
To live its brief moment.

Religions build walls round our love, and science
Is equal of truth and of error. Yet always we find
Such ordered purpose in cell and in galaxy,
So great a glory in life-thrust and mind-range,
Such widening frontiers to draw out our longings,
We grow to one world
Through enlargement of wonder.