Written by: Sam Rabie
Edited by: Abigail George
Love, a Well-Worn Refrain
Love you,
two words with such defiant weight
enough to drive you mad
defining the undefinable.
And yet,
the same two words
can be as casual and mundane
as morning coffee,
a rushed mumble,
a formality to end a call.
Love: a set of choices and devotions,
or the outcome of no choice at all.
A currency,
an exchange of reciprocity,
transacted in the everyday.
Intangible,
an oath we swear by,
an anthem beating
to the rhythm of our cries.
A commodity
bought, sold, displayed.
We fall prey, again,
to the promise of its empty letters.
Branded and packaged in pink ribbons,
we chase its wistful sheen.
Incompatible with the working day,
with suits and jackets,
relegated only to tea and gossip.
Lovelessness plagues us;
cynics we have become,
and yet we still yearn.
Stuck in our fundamental need
for affection,
to feel seen,
to feel heard.
To look out and see your face
framed in every lens,
every angle of another’s eyes.
To be the butt of a joke
only your ears can catch,
only you can understand.
An endless source of light
we draw on,
consume,
devour.
Traded not because it’s rare,
but because it’s always there.
So we give
and we take.
Is that love a well-worn refrain,
soothing us at night,
a lullaby of haunted safety and warmth?
Or
a love that is spectacularly yours,
mine,
and more spectacular,
ours.
Indecipherable to outsiders,
a language only we speak,
only we understand.
Love:
a ritual courtesy,
a dialogue,
a currency,
a commodity.
A refrain to all we sing,
yet to none we believe.
Artist statement
“Love, a Well-Worn Refrain” explores the different dimensions of how we use and understand the word “love”. In our daily lives, love is both everywhere and diffused as a word tacked onto text messages, TV scripts, and branded T-shirts. It’s the rushed love you feel at the end of a phone call, the casual affection we declare for a song, a dessert, a friend we’ve known only briefly. Yet at the same time, love remains our most sacred yearning, the moral and emotional center of our humanity, the foundation of religion, and the value we strive to teach our children.
By tracing love through its registers of formality, dialogue, currency, and commodity, the poem examines its many manifestations and usages in daily life, while also revealing our persistent desire to reclaim it as something sacred, real, and embodied. Love is both the refrain we cannot stop singing and the truth we can never fully name.
The Myth of Falling in Love
Love,
a gust on a cool autumn day,
funnelling up sleeves, through skin,
embodying you anew.
A breath expanding your chest,
pricking your hair, dilating eyes
to see the leaves in their colours,
the world in its vibrance.
Love,
a sight of endless possibilities
the eternal optimist, the blissful idealist,
rendering us again.
Love,
a blanket shielding us
from the outside’s bitter cold,
the cruelty of isolation.
No longer one
insides emulsified,
water that knows no bounds,
no limit or horizon,
a sea of thoughts, feelings, desires
the union of one.
Supernatural, mythical
I behold, I’m betrothed,
mystified and undignified.
What was, what will be,
what is always meant to be.
A love too great, beyond simple reach.
You and me,
consumed, entangled,
foreseen, by this mean.
Cosmically aligned, a vision untouched by the corrupt,
my reflection cast in you
a mirror obscured by your view.
Too vast to comprehend,
unexplainable, undefinable
a well, we simply
F
A
L
L, into.
No entrance, no exit
the myth complete,
a bottomless pit
we can’t reach.
Artist statement
“The Myth of Falling in Love” engages with love as the intangible, the indescribable ‘something you just feel.’ The poem plays with the familiar language of falling in love, a phrase that positions love as passive, accidental, and fated. This framing has deep historical roots in Western literature, long before the conception of modern romance as a genre. I aim to expose the romanticized ideal that we are merely victims of love’s divine force, struck by Cupid’s bow and undone by its spell, a love that loses the self swallowed by the “we”. By reimagining love as a myth, the poem explores what is lost when love is rendered solely as emotion, detached from thought or agency. In contrast to “Love, a Well Worn Refrain”, this poem taps into the ethos of love that has commonly been used to cast love in opposition to reason, and works in dialogue with the last poem of this collection to imagine its potential.
Every Morning I Choose to Love You
Love is not simply feel.
I reach out, your fingers touch mine back.
Warmth and care don’t fit your definition; they lack.
We must define or risk what we get prescribed.
So many of us long, but we won’t leap,
won’t jump amidst the uncertainty and unease.
Call it,
name it,
define and demand.
But first, free it from its wordless ban.
Intangible, unimaginable,
a personal devotion, enacted for our human needs.
More than care, it is something to bear.
A choice I make every morning, every day of the week.
An act, it’s not a simple fact.
Still, I reach for better
to open myself to what I’ve learned to refuse.
To loosen the futile ties,
the reaching with no return,
the giving until empty.
To ask not only of you,
but of the self that remains.
Call it,
name it,
define and demand.
Theorize it into being.
Breathe its words, its meaning
into the lungs of all who retrieve, not simply receive.
Love, when it is thee.
Artist statement
Inspired by bell hooks’ All About Love, “Every Morning I Choose to Love You” invites readers to think of love not only as something we feel but as a deliberate act that demands intention and accountability. The poem asks what it means to bring a theoretical lens to a phenomenon not taken seriously in academia nor in our everyday lives. Love, a concept that hooks defines through the components of care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honesty. It invites us to recognize where our relationships fall short of love and might better be described in terms of what philosophers call its folk conception, emphasizing affection and care. “Every Morning I Choose to Love You” works to reimagine and re-energize love as an active state where love is choice, devotion, and agency. Drawing from hooks’ belief that love is an action rather than a feeling, the poem seeks to reclaim love as something we consciously practice, not something that simply happens to us.
These works start to explore how we interact with, and make sense of, love in our everyday lives, reflecting on the vulnerability of our yearning for more and better love. I acknowledge, however, that these works do not yet account for how race and other structures complicate the experience of love or how its theoretical conception has transformative potential in deconstructing and decolonizing white supremacist thinking that alienates us from ourselves and one another. This poem should therefore be read as a starting point, an initial step looking beyond its central role in romantic relationships and toward integrating love’s theoretical relevance into both the self and society.
Bibliography
Photo: Laura Ockel via Unsplash. Accessed from: https://exepose.com/2023/02/23/is-our-conception-of-love-skewed/
Intersections 