A new poem by Wellington poet and music student Cadence Chung.

love lyrics

In my English lecture we learn about love:
the abiding theme in literature of the past.
We read Keats, who is dead. We read
Chaucer, who is even deader. We read
Shakespeare’s sonnets about beauty
fading and life dwindling and I wonder
to myself how he died: his heart burning
in the slow thrum of iambic pentameter,
then tetrameter, then trimeter, and then
eventually the beats that we don’t
have words for, dwindling out into a
choked 1-beat-per-line, then nothing.
Our lecturer tells us that every elegy is
a love poem, I suppose in the same way
that every graveyard is a banquet
for the worms and a quiet playground for
ghosts. All these old dead men sitting
between us, on our laps, twiddling with
our hair ‒ yours short, mine long and
split-ended. I could write a sonnet about
the way your pencil twiddles across the
page, but I don’t think anyone but me
would even read such a thing. I have an
unfortunate curse ‒ being a living poet,
I am also cursed to be a dead one someday.
But lo! Here’s my heart in my hands,
clots squished on my sleeve, all sinewy
and stringy in that way organs are. If you
don’t want to take it, well, I wouldn’t blame
you. But it’s the same heart that all those
poets had, once. One with reckless abandon,
always finding love in every little corner
and squashing it flat on the page.

Cadence will be performing original lyre compositions inspired by Sappho as part of this weekend’s LitCrawl in Wellington. Visit the Verb website for the full festival programme.

The Friday Poem is edited by Chris Tse. Submissions are currently closed but will open soon.