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.