"Your Grandfather And I've Been Together For 56 Years", Said My Grandma One Night While Showing Some

If ever in life you'll look back and cry remember it won't be because you could not but because you did not.

Shayan Das

I discovered self-love that very day when I extended my arms to embrace your delusional form and ended up embracing myself.

Shayan Das

Valentine's Month Poetry Recommendations 💌

1. Classical (rhymed & metered poetry)

Bright Star by John Keats

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns

Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley

How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Browning

Amoretti LXXV by Edmund Spenser

When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats

I Loved You First by Christina Rossetti

I Am Not Yours by Sara Teasdale

To My Dear Husband by Anne Bradstreet

I Love You by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Air and Angels by John Donne

Love and Death by Lord Byron

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal by Tennyson

2. Modernist/Contemporary (free & blank verses)

Love Sonnet XI by Pablo Naruda

Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore

[i carry your heart with me] by e.e. cummings

Bird-Understander by Craig Arnold

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

For Keeps by Joy Harjo

Always For the First Time by Andre Breton

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

Any Lit by Harryette Mullen

To Be In Love by Gwendolyn Brooks

Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy

Desire by Alice Walker

Romantics by Lisel Mueller

Come, And Be My Baby by Maya Angelou

3. Written by Me (personal selection)

Amore Immortale by Shayan Das

Flawed Perfection by Shayan Das

I Love Thee Not by Shayan Das

A Song of Love by Shayan Das

If Only by Shayan Das

End of Eternity by Shayan Das

For My Valentine by Shayan Das

I discovered self-love that very day when I extended my arms to embrace your delusional form and ended up embracing myself.

Shayan Das

Mother says it's easy to fall in love but hard to love, and that they are two largely different things. She said she never fell in love with me; she just loved me, and I understood exactly why a mother's love persists in all the places where others subside. 

Shayan Das

If Only (Poem) by Shayan Das

[Artworks/Images: In Bed: The Kiss, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1892) | Renoir (2012) | Romantic Lovers, Willem Haenraets]

hi!! i'm assuming here but are you bengali? because I am and i was just curious

i also really like some of your writings! they're really impactful. i saw in one of your posts how much the entire romantic movement affected you and I wanted to say that really shines through your poems and pieces! the entire writing since you were eleven is really relatable because so was i! hope you always keep writing!

Thank you so much for the compliments! Yes, I'm a Bengali, an ardent lover of Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay besides English Romanticism.

My Bengali poems are posted here.

Acrostic: The first letters of each line read vertically downwards spell out my mother's name.

But I've lived—thrived half my afternoons wondering whether mom would prepare my favourite dinner for the evening; put up with distances hoping it would make the brief meetings monumental; got through half my exams pondering about the things I would do the night after the last paper; fought extra hours expecting it would help me sleep better. Lord, I no longer wonder why 'tis so easy to give up when you've got nothing to hope for.

Shayan Das