Love Poems 2025
Much abides in NYC & beyond; love poems by June Jordan, Saul Williams, D.H. Lawrence, and Nikki Giovanni.
Dear ones, old ones, new friends, comrades:
Happy Valentine’s Day. It’s good to come to this turning place in the seasons—still cold, the days lengthening, the birds huddling on the sills—to gather some love poems for you, gather my thoughts. 2025! On New Year’s Eve some friends and dear ones wrote things we wanted to shed on scraps of paper, dissolved them, banged pots and pans, toasted the new, toasted to love.
About two weeks ago, huddled around a table at my favorite sauna with some dear friends for my birthday, we reflected on the insanity of the era we’re living through. Revanchist politics. Ecological Crisis. A chasm of inequalities, both material and imaginative. Two friends had just gotten back from Los Angeles. One flew in on the night the wildfires began to spread, the wing of their plane illuminated by the flames below. The Santa Ana belongs to the katabatic class of winds—the straight-faced meteorological translation of which is something like “flowing-strongly-downward” but make no mistake, the root of the word is katabasis, the Greek term for a descent to the underworld.
In my own realms, the past year was an equivocal one: no great personal triumphs or tragedies; some sloughs and setbacks, though of the kind that are tempering; some great vistas amid all and great things in the works, beneath the surface for now, taking root, readying to flower. In January, I spent two weeks in Maine and am carrying some of the images from that trip in my heart, like talismans. A view of mountain peaks, sharp, bright, and blue in the distance against a long white expanse of snow and ice. Shooting across a saltwater channel on a friend’s skiff, trading jokes about hypothermia as the salt water sprayed at our sides through the bright, frozen air.
I got to visit with friends and do some compass-setting for my own work, but in a larger sense the trip was about befriending winter. Those who know me well know that I’m traditionally something of a wuss about cold weather. And so bundling up and setting out, finding the beauty and expansiveness in the cold and also taking seriously the cold’s invitation to savor drawing inward felt like a maturation. I’m carrying that wisdom with me, finding ways to befriend and take in winter in deeper, less literal ways even now. Wholeness calls us to visit all the seasons, of our hearts and the world around us.
In this yearly email I usually invoke the importance of love as solace and strength, whatever else is going on internally and in the world. And that remains true. To the extent that discouragement is sloshing around in the Zeitgeist, I think it’s to be resisted. New ways of being—ones that are caring and creative and mutual—are in formation even and especially now. The new always takes longer to constellate than the old, brittle ways of being. How we love is at the heart of this, and attending to romantic love is not a form of quietism or retreat; rather, it’s a place where revolution and reciprocity are at our fingertips, where we form the ways of being that emanate into our communal lives and public-facing work.
At first I thought I’d write a long disquisition here about love and poetry and new stories, sensuality and mutuality and collective imagination. Starting later this spring, I’ll be curating a separate publication about myth and the new stories our culture needs; better to leave my personal list here to its annual harvest of love poems. My email these days is ienorton@outlook.com; if you reply direct to this message it’ll go straight to the same inbox, same as it ever was. If you’re getting this note, I’d love to hear from you: hear what’s in winter in your life and what in emergence. Valentine’s Day is grafted onto the old agricultural festal calendar, in which mid-February is when the world starts to wake from winter and the birds choose their mates.
So, without further ado, here’s this year’s love poems, beacons all: searing, stunning June Jordan, lyrical, prophetic Saul Williams, lyrical, prophetic D.H. Lawrence, and the irreverent, indelible Nikki Giovanni.
Love always,
Ingrid
*
Love as Liberation
How can we love well—love tenderly, love mutually—when the world we live in is brutal? What do we do when the political invades our intimate lives? June Jordan’s “Intifada Incantation” articulates the way our romantic and civic desires are related, indissoluble. It was written in 1996 and echoes of that era—of Jordan and Audre Lorde’s involvement in pro-Palestinian activism, the fights over affirmative active—lead off the poem, which remains relevant in other bone-deep ways. I first heard it read in a recording of an Alexis Pauline Gumbs lecture from last year, where Gumbs reads it aloud with Terry Tempest Williams. Spoken, with two voices alternating the lines (a fabulous way to enjoy any of the love poems on this list) the poem sounds wistful and then passionate.
On the page, in ALL CAPS, it’s much more confronting. The poem opens with a shout of pain and protest: all the brutalities countenanced and backed and directly perpetrated globally, nationally, locally—how can one possibly love in the midst of that? As the poem goes on, the desires named become more intimate. The speaker wants justice and they want a particular kiss. They don’t just desire to love—they’re loved back too and in the crux of that they find in themselves the resolution to love as well.
The transformation belies the brilliance of the poem’s form: as the speaker shifts from anger and aspiration to a decision to commit to love, the capitalized letters go from being a yell of protest to a pronouncement of resolution. To continue to love means creating a pearl out of the frictions of the heart, the grit of the world. Hearing the poem for the first time, it feels like the address shifts from political to personal. But both romance and politics are at heart relational, whether the scale of relationship is one pair of lovers or a whole culture. This poem keeps singing through my mind. Whether spoken to a nation or spoken to a lover, the decision to love and to create is the most profound commitment we can make.
June Jordan
Intifada Incantation
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND REACTION I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC OUT THE WINDOWS I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY NOBODY COLD I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR I WANTED NOBODY ROLL BACK THE TREES! I WANTED NOBODY TAKE AWAY DAYBREAK! I WANTED NOBODY FREEZE ALL THE PEOPLE ON THEIR KNEES! I WANTED YOU I WANTED YOUR KISS ON THE SKIN OF MY SOUL AND NOW YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I STAND DESPITE THE TRILLION TREACHERIES OF SAND YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I HOLD THE LONGING OF THE WINTER IN MY HAND YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I COMMIT TO FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING OF THE PEARL YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I HAVE BEGUN I BEGIN TO BELIEVE MAYBE MAYBE YOU DO I AM TASTING MYSELF IN THE MOUTH OF THE SUN
Love as Shapeshifter
One of my favorite movies of the last few years is Neptune Frost, Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s visionary fable from 2022. It’s the kind of work that’s hard to summarize: the central characters are drawn by prophetic dreams to join a revolutionary collective of hackers living off-the-grid; it’s also a gender-fluid love story.
The film powerfully visualizes the way that our poisoned information ecosystem is at the heart of all the other forms of injustice that surround us but above all Neptune Frost imagines what an antidote might look and sound like: expressive, creative, thrumming with music and poetry and coming directly from the inner and literal places that have been pushed to the margins but are at the heart of our contemporary world (the movie was filmed in Rwanda but takes place is purposefully unnamed African landscape and moment; some of the characters mine coltan, a conflict mineral ala cobalt). If I owned a movie theater, we’d screen it every week.
The movie had a long gestation—the story a seed in Saul Williams’s imagination for more than a decade, which he first thought would take the form of a concept album or theatre piece. Neptune Frost ultimately led me back to Williams’s poetry, in particular some of his early stuff, from the 1990s, when he first came to prominence amidst the national slam poetry and spoken word scene. The fact that imagination is a form of resistance, that the fictions we make and verses we sing condition what’s possible in the world, is a through-line in all his work. So is an attentiveness to the global contours of what we’re facing and an imaginative expansiveness around gender (“interplanetary truth is androgenous,” he declares in his still-fresh first collection).
The poem that’s been reverberating through my imagination comes from She, Williams’s 1999 collection of poetry. The she of the title is alternately Williams’s feminine side, a partner he’s becoming estranged from, and the force of love itself. The below poem reminds me of the old myths where Eros creates the world and eros is a shapeshifter and trickster, who takes on different forms and genders depending on the day, depending on the beloved. But always, love is a force that gallops through our lives and animates it, that changes even as it remains the backbeat and the lyric to all our days.
Saul Stacey Williams
from She
love is an unbridled horse with one wing out-stretched the other tucked and folded on the right side the horse galloping towards a cliff knowingly panting just enough for you to think he’s laughing he? love is male? love is a dumb horse with silver streaks and a sometimes penis a sometimes penis? on thursdays the rest of the week she grazes and paints her hooves with red mud making tracks through the fields which disappear soon after they appear because nature has a way of changing the same way it remains
Love as Elemental
Over the past year or so, I’ve been rediscovering D.H. Lawrence. Teaching the Isis and Osiris story in 2023 sent me to one of Lawrence’s last works, a novella in which Jesus survives his crucifixion, is disgusted by the stories being spread about him, goes on the road, and meets and falls for a priestess to the goddess Isis (“I am risen,” he proclaims, getting it up when they’re about to make love). The story reminded me that Lawrence also viewed sensuality and mutual love as central to finding a way beyond inherited and invented forms of repression.
Last year around this time I was rereading The Rainbow, his incandescent 1915 novel that follows three generations of lovers from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, as a new era gives birth to both deadening and destructive forms of life and to new possibilities for self-making and romantic aspiration. I then followed him to (and guttered out on) Women in Love, The Rainbow’s sort-of sequel, and was reminded of the brittle, over-bearing plotting and battle-of-the-sexes dialogue that made me put Lawrence aside in the first place when I was younger.
I’ve always had similarly mixed feelings about his poetry. For every profound lyrical poem like “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through” and “Autumn at Taos,” there’s just as many that are marked by the vatic pronouncements and emotional portentousness that sometimes capsizes his prose. But this winter I’ve been spending some time separating the wheat from the chaff.
I’ve included two of Lawrence’s great love poems here. “The Young Wife,” which he wrote when newly married to his wife Frieda, articulates the volcanic emotions that deep, intimate love can unearth and which Lawrence at his best is one of the most subtle chroniclers of. The fact that love awakens our shadows is inseparable from what makes it so transformative, an elemental force in our psyches and in the world. “The Elephant is Slow to Mate,” meanwhile, is Lawrence in a more playful mode, one of the (many) sexy poems he writes about other species. In this case, taking inspiration from the real fact that the long-lived elephant’s sexual peak comes in mid-life, he pays tribute to the role of patience and maturity when it comes to erotic satisfaction.
D.H. Lawrence
The Young Wife
The pain of loving you
Is almost more than I can bear.
I walk in fear of you.
The darkness starts up where
You stand, and the night comes through
Your eyes when you look at me.
Ah never before did I see
The shadows that live in the sun!
Now every tall glad tree
Turns round its back to the sun
And looks down on the ground, to see
The shadow it used to shun.
At the foot of each glowing thing
A night lies looking up.
Oh, and I want to sing
And dance, but I can't lift up
My eyes from the shadows: dark
They lie spilt round the cup.
What is it? — Hark
The faint fine seethe in the air!
Like the seething sound in a shell!
It is death still seething where
The wild-flower shakes its bell
And the skylark twinkles blue —
The pain of loving you
Is almost more than I can bear.
*
The Elephant is Slow to Mate
The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait
for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse
and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.
So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.
Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.
They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.
Love as Trickster
I’ll give the last word this year to the late, great Nikki Giovanni, who died just this past December at age 81. One can only imagine her uttering a parting one liner, tapping out during this particular political moment.
I was lucky to hear her give a spectacularly assured reading when I was living in Detroit in 2010. I remember her irrepressible energy and irreverent humor and her tangents about everything from police stops to what kind of foods you should put on your plate when you’re eating alone. Above all, I remember when she read what may be her most famous poem, “ego tripping,” though it’s more likely to be remembered from its line “I am a beautiful woman,” as Giovanni conjures and speaks from the perspective of a continent- and century-bestriding Black woman, who once crossed the Nile, the Sahara, your backyard, mother and queen. As Giovanni recited the last line, “I can fly / like a bird in the sky” the woman sitting to my right, so many of the Black women sitting around me in the audience, murmured it along with her.
Across the decades of her career, Giovanni never stopped writing love poems, sexy poems, come-on poems, plumbing-the-heart poems: the many moods and sides of love all come in for illumination at one time or another.
For this year’s email, I’ve included one poem of estrangement and one of erotic invitation. Giovanni’s wit is on display in both: “Balances” feels its way through a relationship that’s ebbing and is from one her first books while “That Day” is a sly, joyous, and spirited paean to eros written a decade later. I was just as heartened to learn from a biography of Giovanni (written by her wife Virginia Fowler—it must be gratifying to marry one’s biographer) that she wrote “That Day” during a straitened period in her late 30s that was more marked by precarity, obligation, and exhaustion than lustiness. But when we imagine, we keep parts of ourselves alive for different tomorrows. “That Day” remained a crowd-pleaser for decades after she first wrote it, during the many other blooms of Giovanni’s life, including her marriage to Fowler. What we keep alive and call on does come back to us.
Nikki Giovanni
Balances
in life
one is always
balancing
like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers
or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)
3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth
our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street
and lately i've begun wondering
if you're trying to tell me something
we used to talk all night
and do things alone together
and i've begun
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you
*
That Day
if you've got the key
then i've got the door
let's do what we did
when we did it before
if you've got the time
i've got the way
let's do what we did
when we did it all day
you get the glass
i've got the wine
we'll do what we did
when we did it overtime
if you've got the dough
then i've got the heat
we can use my oven
til it's warm and sweet
i know i'm bold
coming on like this
but the good things in life
are too good to be missed
now time is money
and money is sweet
if you're busy baby
we can do it on our feet
we can do it on the floor
we can do it on the stair
we can do it on the couch
we can do it in the air
we can do it in the grass
and in case we get an itch
i can scratch it with my left hand
cause i'm really quite a witch
if we do it once a month
we can do it in time
if we do it once a week
we can do it in rhyme
if we do it every day
we can do it everyway
we can do it like we did it
when we did it
that day
