Saturday Rave: For If Love Fled, If Love It Was by Leon de Greiff

There's a lot of love poetry around.

Of course poems can be about anything at all, and they're more and more often about all sorts of unlikely things from motor cars to Jeremy Corbyn (and this is a fine and desirable state of affairs), but love poems are still being written to try to make sense of it all.

These love poems generally fall into two sorts: I am in love and I was in love. That's one thing that makes this poem by the Colombian writer León de Greiff extraordinary.

Here's the beginning. The translation is by Paul Archer.

For if love fled, if love it was
let love go and go with the grief,
and embrace life with a clear head and open arms,
and cry a little bit for what was...
For if love fled, if love it was...

The whole of this short poem can be found HERE.

A slippery thing, love, at times - but then if it wasn't then I suppose there wouldn't be nearly as many poems in the world.

And our love would be expressed in terms of x and y.


León de Greiff

Word To Use Today: embrace. This word comes from the Old French brace, a pair of arms, from the Latin bracchia, arms.