The Bewilderment of rapture! Carol Ann Duffy and Jeanette Winterson

 I love the way both Winterson and Duffy capture the utter disorientation of love. Love is finding your way and losing your way at the same time.  Certainty and complacency are false friends and the abject enemies of life’s joy!

Rapture – 1 the state of being rapt or transported; ecstatic joy; 2 the act of transferring a person from one place to another

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find that the solid floor is a trap door and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? (Jeanette Winterson, The Passion)

YOU

Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head.
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

Falling in love
is glamorous hell: the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger, ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin.
into my life, larger than life, you strolled in.

I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,
in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,
staring back from anyone’s face, from the shape of a cloud,
from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me

as I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are
on the bed, like gift, like a touchable dream.

(Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy)

  Before the time I did Lysander see,

 Seem’d Athens as a paradise to me.

O then what graces in my love do dwell,

That he hath turn’d a heaven unto a hell! (Hermia, Act One, sc.1, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

From Forest by Carol Ann Duffy

There were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping

The last of the light in their upturned petals. I followed you in,

Under the sighing, restless trees and my whole life vanished.

Janet Lewison

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