10 Best Famous Love Poems Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Love Poems poems. This is a select list of the best famous Love Poems poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Love Poems poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of love poems poems.

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If A Tree Could Wander

by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Oh, if a tree could wander

     and move with foot and wings!

It would not suffer the axe blows

     and not the pain of saws!

For would the sun not wander

     away in every night ?

How could at ev’ry morning

     the world be lighted up?

And if the ocean’s water

     would not rise to the sky,

How would the plants be quickened

     by streams and gentle rain?

The drop that left its homeland,

     the sea, and then returned ?

It found an oyster waiting

     and grew into a pearl.

Did Yusaf not leave his father,

     in grief and tears and despair?

Did he not, by such a journey,

     gain kingdom and fortune wide?

Did not the Prophet travel

     to far Medina, friend?

And there he found a new kingdom

     and ruled a hundred lands.

You lack a foot to travel?

     Then journey into yourself!

And like a mine of rubies

     receive the sunbeams? print!

Out of yourself ? such a journey

     will lead you to your self,

It leads to transformation

     of dust into pure gold!

 

Look! This is Love – Poems of Rumi,

Annemarie Schimmel

The Way Things Should

by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

What will our children do in the morning?

Will they wake with their hearts wanting to play, the way wings should?

Will they have dreamed the needed flights and gathered the strength from the planets that all men and women need to balance the wonderful charms of the earth

so that her power and beauty does not make us forget our own?

I know all about the ways of the heart – how it wants to be alive.

Love so needs to love that it will endure almost anything, even abuse, just to flicker for a moment. But the sky’s mouth is kind, its song will never hurt you, for I sing those words.

What will our children do in the morning if they do not see us fly?

 

From Love Poems from God, by Daniel Ladinsky.

Copyright © 2002 by Daniel Ladinsky. Reprinted by permission of the author.

I Go Back To The House For A Book

by Billy Collins
 I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me —
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.

He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid —
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

Letter to My Lover After Seven Years

by Erica Jong
 You gave me the child
that seamed my belly
& stitched up my life.

You gave me: one book of love poems,
five years of peace
& two of pain.

You gave me darkness, light, laughter
& the certain knowledge
that we someday die.

You gave me seven years
during which the cells of my body
died & were reborn.

Now we have died
into the limbo of lost loves,
that wreckage of memories
tarnishing with time,
that litany of losses
which grows longer with the years,
as more of our friends
descend underground
& the list of our loved dead
outstrips the list of the living.

Knowing as we do
our certain doom,
knowing as we do
the rarity of the gifts we gave
& received,
can we redeem
our love from the limbo,
dust it off like a fine sea trunk
found in an attic
& now more valuable
for its age & rarity
than a shining new one?

Probably not.
This page is spattered
with tears that streak the words
lose, losses, limbo.

I stand on a ledge in hell
still howling for our love
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