Love Letters 1: We River

This is the first of my fourth and final series of fourteen sonnets: love letters. Each of these sonnets is a letter to someone, or something, I love, or have loved. Deeply.

I will not reveal who, or what, each letter is dedicated to.

‘We River’ is an extended metaphor. It begins with theft from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The course of true love never did run smooth.” The first line of the sonnet uses this logic to establish the metaphor of love as a river. It then explores the commonalities of these two nouns: one concrete, one abstract.

As always, this sonnet was not the one I imagined I’d write at the outset. Starting a poem is like tipping the pieces out of a jigsaw with no picture on the box.

We River
Love runs not smooth, it’s river it’s not lake:
Crash-smashing into rocks as if it can
Remove the obstacles that make it snake;
Brash barriers to water’s forward plan.
But rivers have to twist, contort and writhe
Rave raucously on beds and over drops;
They’re beautiful because they’re wild and lithe
Their fervour races on… it never stops.
At times our liquid love reaches full flood
With pow’r to drag us down amongst the weeds;
At others it dries up like rage-spilt blood
On battlefields distressed by vicious deeds.
	But never will our river cease to move
	No damn drawback could its essence remove.