Love & Wild Irises

With Valentines Day coming up I would like to place this, one of my most favorite of poems, out there. Ideally, love should be spontaneous and unexpected but the reality can be very different. The daily dreary routine of family life destroys the spontaneous give and take of true love. It gets completely choked and suppressed by the dull monotonous and boring duties of daily household life like cooking a meal for the family, feeding the baby or taking the clothes to the cleaners, becoming a chauffeur ... Susan Griffin captures, in a very moving way, the feelings of many people who yearn for true love which is as spontaneous and reinvigorating as the sudden and unexpected blooming of the wild iris after a thunder storm. However, it is not meant to be that love should die down, but blossom into something greater!

Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields

Love should grow up like a wild iris in the fields,
unexpected, after a terrible storm, opening a purple
mouth to the rain, with not a thought to the future,
ignorant of the grass and the graveyard of leaves
around, forgetting its own beginning.
Love should grow like a wild iris
but does not.

Love more often is to be found in kitchens at the dinner hour,
tired out and hungry, lingers over tables in houses where
the walls record movements, while the cook is probably angry,
and the ingredients of the meal are budgeted, while
a child cries feed me now and her mother not quite
hysterical says over and over, wait just a bit, just a bit,
love should grow up in the fields like a wild iris
but never does
really startle anyone, was to be expected, was to be
predicted, is almost absurd, goes on from day to day, not quite
blindly, gets taken to the cleaners every fall, sings old
songs over and over, and falls on the same piece of rug that
never gets tacked down, gives up, wants to hide, is not
brave, knows too much, is not like an
iris growing wild but more like
staring into space
in the street
not quite sure
which door it was, annoyed about the sidewalk being
slippery, trying all the doors, thinking
if love wished the world to be well, it would be well.

Love should
grow up like a wild iris, but doesn't, it comes from
the midst of everything else, sees like the iris
of an eye, when the light is right,
feels in blindness and when there is nothing else is
tender, blinks, and opens
face up to the skies.

~ Susan Griffin ~

(Like the Iris of an Eye)