Saturday Poetry – ‘Heart to Heart’ by Rita Dove
Saturday Poetry – ‘Heart to Heart’ by Rita Dove
This week’s Saturday Poetry brings you the soul-stirring poem titled ‘Heart to Heart’ by Rita Dove. The author of numerous collections of poetry, Rita Dove served as the US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2005 to 2011. “How to find words for the human heart and all the emotions we ascribe to it? The path is a veritable minefield of clichés—those well-intentioned, once-fresh expressions whose very popularity has rendered them useless, even laughable. I decided to take these tired metaphors and deconstruct their camouflage, until all that remains is the true ‘heart’ of the matter: one human being, stripped of blather and artifice, speaking to the beloved“, Dove expressed.
For this edition of Saturday Poetry, we have paired Dove’s emotive words with mobile art by the talented @christineosobczak with the captivating artwork untitled complementing the poem’s essence beautifully, creating a symphony of emotions.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
via Poets.org
Heart to Heart by Rita Dove
It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.
It doesn’t have
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want—
but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.
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