veneralia (love changelings) – haiku chain

love is unchanging

but like the moon looks different

with each month coming

*

from bright new closeness

of a full worm supermoon*

illuminating us

transfiguring all

the sleeping world with budding

love awakenings

*

as each mood succeeds

mood and sad and happy mix

we’re changelings in love

*

our inconstancy

moves, begets us, forgot in

guiltless venery

*

our loves’ festival:

bathe in the pools of Venus

crowned with myrtle

*

rediscover the

endless beauty of new fresh

never ending loves

*

**

*

omm

  • Veneralia was a festival held on 1 April in honour of Venus, Goddess of Love (Aphrodite to the Greeks). Women bathed together, crowned in myrtle, in the goddess’ honour. The festival was specifically focused on Venus’ attribute as Venus Verticordia – alluding to an aspect of the goddess as a “changer of hearts” – in this case, her ability to transform lustful love into chaste or platonic love. In this poem, the changing of hearts is seen in the context of a constancy of love that continues even when the love objects change.
  • *On 21 March 2019, the Spring Equinox, there was a full worm super moon. Looking from my window in The Hague, I saw an irradiated sky of swift moving clouds whose intermittent gaps opened a flood of stunning illuminations. They lit up everything like the flash of sudden universal compassion that can come with a new love, undermining cynicism and suffusing all in a bath of warm golden light.
  • Photos by Timothy Dykes and Guzman Burquin; Venus Verticordia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Comments

  1. Camilla Levan says

    A wondrous exhortation to go forth and prolifically fuck!

    May all the world make wild abandoned love this spring!

  2. Freddie says

    Great advice – although there’s more to love than fucking, it’s surely a gift from god.

  3. James Wood says

    To me, it’s less about sex and fucking and love-making as such, much more about how we as humans are moody and inconstant, and the objects of our love also change – either because we shift from one to the next, or because the same loved one changes ((within themselves or in our perceptions of them)) – but a continuity exists in love.

    Real love is timeless and unchanging, no matter its object.

    • Ashish says

      But if “real love is timeless”, why oh why do we (most of us, I think 🤔🧐😍)) change the objects of our love? Are we loving wrong?

      • James Wood says

        That’s only a perception:

        “love is unchanging / but like the moon looks different / with each month coming”

    • Yu Yan Yip says

      It‘s also about being grateful for, and mindful of, the love we have.

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