Romance Fest Prompts

[melagan.livejournal.com]

Please comment to this post with your prompt suggestions. Prompts may be anything including, but not limited to, pictures, poetry or song. You may offer as many prompts for the fest as your romantic heart desires.

Comments

[trillingstar]

Born of my voiceless time, your steps
Slowly, ecstatically advance:
Toward my expectation's bed
They move in a hushed, ice-clean trance.
Pure being, shadow-shape divine-
Your step deliberate, how sweet!
God!-every gift I have imagined
Comes to me on those naked feet.
If so it be your offered mouth
Is shaped already to appease
That which occupied my thought
With the live substance of a kiss,
Oh hasten not this loving act,
Rapture where self and not-self meet:
My life has been the awaiting of you.
Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
-- Paul Valery, "The Footsteps"

*

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
-- Rumi, The Essential Rumi

*

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
-- Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII

*

Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.
-- Margaret Atwood, "Variations on the Word Love"

[kitchyy.livejournal.com]

That last one always seems to kick me in the stomach with how simple yet powerful it is. Love Margaret Atwood and love your prompts here!