Poems that you love

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First Love

It was a flower.

There had been,
before I could even speak,
another infant, girl or boy unknown,
who drew me—I had
an obscure desire to become
connected in some way to this other,
even to be what I faltered after, falling
to hands and knees, crawling
a foot or two, clambering
up to follow further until
arms swooped down to bear me away.
But that one left no face, had exchanged
no gaze with me.

This flower:
                         suddenly
there was Before I saw it, the vague
past, and Now. Forever. Nearby
was the sandy sweep of the Roman Road,
and where we sat the grass
was thin. From a bare patch
of that poor soil, solitary,
sprang the flower, face upturned,
looking completely, openly
into my eyes.
                       I was barely
old enough to ask and repeat its name.
"Convolvulus," said my mother.
Pale shell-pink, a chalice
no wider across than a silver sixpence.

It looked at me, I looked
back, delight
filled me as if
I, not the flower,
were a flower and were brimful of rain.
And there was endlessness.
Perhaps through a lifetime what I've desired
has always been to return
to that endless giving and receiving, the wholeness
of that attention,
that once-in-a-lifetime
secret communion.

~Denise Levertov

I was just telling my daughter last night at dinner about a poet I had run across that I loved named, you guessed it, Denise Levertov. I’m reading one of her collections right now and was trying to decide which of her poems to post on this thread. I hadn’t run across this one yet.  I haven’t read all the Black Mountain poets but she is my favorite by far.