February 12, 2009

• Happy (Early) St. Valentine’s Day!

   

  I am heading home for the weekend, so I have to post this early since the effect will be utterly lost if posted after the fact!

  Every St. Valentine’s Day since my freshman year of high school (1998-99) I have made it my mission to bring to those women who haven’t a Valentine some measure of gladness on what can be for some a very long and lonely day. In the last ten years, when the concept of a Valentine had been relevant (since up until that point girls were “yucky”), I have only twice had a Valentine: one was indeed my girlfriend, and one was a young lady I was courting. Being of very slender means, I was not really able to afford anything so extravagant as roses, chocolates, etc. So from afar in Wyoming I mailed my girlfriend a plastic rose (so it would not die en route), a chocolate bar, and a newly-composed poem now lost to time and her devices. This was all placed inside a cardboard poster tube and mailed across the frigid wastes of Nebraska, arriving safely at her door in Iowa.

  The next year was quite different, in that I had no money even for such an economical endeavor as a plastic flower and Hershey’s chocolate. But the love I had for this woman whom I was courting was unlike any I’d experienced up until that point of my life, and I was easily moved to words. So instead of a dozen roses, I wrote within a week’s span fourteen poems, in recognition of Feb. 14th, and gave them to her, the chief poem among them being titled, “Poor Man’s Roses.”

  Now that I am studying for the priesthood, I am obviously no more a-courting, as my vow of chastity solidifies my affections Elsewhere, though it permits me a freedom to love as I have never before known. My St. Valentine’s mission has not slackened in the least; in truth, I have come to know especially through Xanga that such genuine expressions of love are desperately needed in a world where truth, where love, where real acceptance for a person is so hard to find. So I write on, and every year I try posting a poem on my site for all of the women who might come across it. I offer these poems not for praise or for any kind of return, but chiefly for this: that all women, especially those who feel lost, rejected, unloved or in any other way laden with sorrow might know even in some small degree that they are beautiful, they are loved not only by me, but most of all by the God who created them, fashioning them in secret that he might make real for them his great and boundless love. Were God’s love an ocean, this poem and the love I offer you all through it would be but a particle of mist.

  Here is this year’s poem, in all modesty. Please forgive any baseness, mediocrity, presumption or any other thing that might detract from the intention of the heart behind the pen. If you enjoy this, please recommend it to others. Should you stumble across someone on Xanga who feels alone and unloved this day, bring them here in the hopes that my few words might allow for them a brief moment of light on their cloudy day. God bless you all, in great abundance always.

  Humbly yours this St. Valentine’s Day, Jacob

  “The Truth of the Matter”

  For St. Valentine’s Day 2009

   

  What is night but sunless day,

  that orb having gone her shattered way

  ‘til she gathers ‘gain each wayward star

  and breaks the darkness with the dawn

  of her face, the misty veil drawn

  back as she ascends heaven’s stair?

   

  So too my love, bedewed in sorrow,

  take heart, for on the morrow

  the shattered truth of thee assembles,

  stitched with patience, men’d with tears,

  with trials tempered o’er long years

  ‘til before thee all creation trembles.

   

  For no creature, land or fine art,

  no sight nor sound, no whole nor part

  of anything can close compare

  to the truth of thee, when ‘tis known

  and the world’s lies be overgrown

  with beauty’s flowers everywhere.

   

  The truth, dear love, ‘tis quite plain;

  I sing not a new verse, but a buried strain,

  that thou art beautiful by birth.

  Thy beauty is no measurement of flesh or bone;

  these things be merely the lovely home

  of a star betwixt heaven and earth.

   

  This star, this radiant sun awaiting dawn,

  when deception falls, its curtain drawn

  lo! a light ‘fore which no shadow may stand!

  Be free, love, of the world’s cloud of lies

  that would paint thy flesh to please men’s eyes;

  be woman, the glory of God’s hand!

  

   

  • 5:07 pm
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