POETRY ON VALENTINE'S DAY
By:  Iris P. Concepcion

I had clearly remembered the skittishness by which I had celebrated Valentine's Day when I was in grade school.  I shall be pinned a heart insignia on my dress, flaring in red with socks up to my knees, silently oding to the gods of Olympus that I shall be spared from cupid's arrow that looked like a doctor's scalpel out to slit my throat.

Unerasable too are the tacky messages inscribed in the cards with the following gems of words:

Don't
4-get
2-pray
4-me
======
10-derly

Or the terrible mistake of ascribing words to country names similar to this:

I-I
T-trust
A-and
L-love
Y-you

At a prime age of 44 and totally rinsed off any mushiness, I had evolved an acronym, LOVE, that I had written like the Italian, genius word above.

LOVE= Logistics Onboard a Vehicle of Equality

February 14 regurgirates with verses and prose as I was dozing off, half awake, after I took my lunch.

Benetah the waves
Of sunbeam's rays
An apple twig
Birthed a pear's egg.

Another highlight thunderbolting in my mind:

Have you not lingerly
Pierced a soul's
Sculptural bent
Elevating awareness
Of connubial heritage

Hidden partly in consciousness
Soaring mentally to
A sworded world
Bequeathed to a Supreme
Calling of nature's Piety.

Half of my day was spent scribbling these lines, aside of course, from meeting a happy band of birds that had grown bigger in weight, all plump and splendid, on my afternoon walk to the public library.