This collection of love poems is the 7th entry in my Valentine’s Day series of e-books celebrating love. Love, perhaps more than anything else, has the power to sweep us up into rapture and deliver us to the shore of a new life. In its most sublime form, rapture allows us to forfeit the need to drive our lives to a destination and, instead, turn our lives over to love. To be “wandering in rapture” is to follow love wherever it leads. Of course, this is a romanticized vision of a divine life, a huge leap from where most of us live our day-to-day existence, seemingly reserved for saints and angels and the most spiritually evolved among us. But when I am carried away in rapture, I know it is who we are, and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I know we are all already there. Poetery is the language most suited to rapture and has been the instrument of its tramsmission throughout the ages. I do not pretend to be in the same starlit heaven as Rumi or Mirabai or Saint Francis of Assisi, but the rapture of ecstatic poetry opens my heart like no other lover and the view it offers is sublime. The ecstatic is not reserved only for poets who are skewered with joy and swept away in the Rapture of Delight:

Anybody whose heart 
has been broken
into tenderness 
can be lifted into rapture 
by the sunset lapdance
of wave against shore
or the glittery fragrance of lilac.

Delight is one of those words 
you have to say over and over 
until your tongue 
is a hummingbird 
dipping for the nectar. 

It originally meant 
from the stars. 
That is how far 
Delight has come 
in search of a garden 
where it can flourish. 

All it takes is to turn 
the heart over and say,  

“I will be the lens 
of your lighthouse 
and all the fields around
are yours to seed.”