Two poems for Valentine’s Day from Edge contributor, Kurt Kruger. The first, an acrostic, built on the Francis Bacon quote, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion,” the second, a dusty old sonnet.
Excellent Beauty
There at last
Is proof that
No mean is
Excellent.
Beauty makes
That the rule.
Has she seen
Not only
Some man? My
Strangeness fits
In her own:
The Golden
Proportion.
Sonnet #5
As if I wouldn’t rail against the wind
For coursing through the tangle of your hair;
As if your drink against me hasn’t sinned
That wets such lips with no one I would share;
As if your bath, devoid of any shame,
Does not lap cloyingly upon your shore;
As if your clothes, oblivious to blame,
Do not obscure the form that I adore.
Toward all that touches you it is as if
My jealousy’s a force that can’t condone
That anything may pass across the rift
Between what you can sense and what I’d own.
Don’t speak to me as if it weren’t true,
The world is cut in half: the rest and you.
