"I Have Been Thinking about Love Again," by Vievee Francis
Let's gather to explore the use of images in determining what you are
Hello hello, we are back! Happy new year to you, gatherer, and welcome to another year of poetry. I cannot believe I started this little project in 2022 and it is still going strong.
Thank you for your patience over my brief hiatus. Let me explain: I was tired. In the final weeks of 2023, I was spent. I finished applying to graduate programs at the end of November, and in the first days of December, my long-term partner and I decided we wanted to elope (and we did)! At the end of 2023, I became a wife, I celebrated my nuptials and the holidays with my family, I read and wrote and relaxed. I returned to myself.
I’ve started thinking of this past autumn as a thaw (ironic as Boston recently had its first snow of the season). I lived frozen in the pandemic and post-pandemic eras for so long, living every day in a fog where all I wanted was safety and security. It was stasis. I’m moving forward once again, experiencing life again in all of its shades of joy and pain. I chose today’s poem as a celebration of all this thaw I’m experiencing this winter, and of remembering who I am.
Gatherer, I hope you are well this winter, wherever you are reading from. Thank you for continuing this journey with me. Let’s gather.
I Have Been Thinking about Love Again
By Vievee Francis
Those who live to have it and those who live to give it. Of course there are those for whom both are true, but never in the same measure. Those who have it to give are like cardinals in the snow. So easy and beautifully lit. Some are rabbits. Hard to see except for those who would prey upon them: all that softness and quaking and blood. Those who want it cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons, any furred thing will do. So easy to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard. I wander out into the winter. I know what I am.
Vievee Francis titled this poem “I Have Been Thinking about Love Again” which begins the poem. The title carries the voice of the speaker, especially with the addition of “Again” at the end of the title. Love is a subject the speaker thinks about often, something that wanders through her mind. The first stanza expands on her pondering. She is wondering about the people that live to be loved and those who live to give love. That is where her first thought ends—this binary of how people live with love. This thought sits alone in its box at the beginning of the poem.
In the second stanza, Francis blends these images together, creating gray space. She concedes that there are people that, admittedly in unequal measures, live to love and be loved. These first two stanzas contain the crux of her thoughts: people and how they love. In the title, Francis leads with love, but the poem focuses on people, not their love. She is fascinated by what differentiates these two people, and maybe how someone can exist simultaneously being both.
She flips the order she introduced these two archetypes in and begins describing the people who have love to give. She paints a wintery landscape, full of white and dark browns, gray skies and stillness. In the color desert is a cardinal, bright red and lit and full of love to give, proclaiming to the world “here I am.” But people with love to give come in many shades, and these people can also be rabbits, camouflaged and timid, hiding from those who would take their love from them: predators who see “softness and quaking and blood.”
The image of those who want love is violent. They cannot be satisfied. They use their talons to rip out any living thing’s throbbing heart to feel loved. My initial inclination was to assume Francis was passing judgment on these two types of people, pitting them against each other. And who knows, maybe she is.
I think she’s just noticing. I think she notices that like the predator and prey in the unforgiving snow, those who want to love and those who want to be loved live in a balance that may appear violent to the observer. The predator, the one who so desperately wants love, simply cannot survive without those willing to give love.
I love how Francis ends this poem. She enters the landscape she created full of creatures vying for love. She stands among her creation and realizes she knows what she is, she knows the relationship she has with love–and she keeps it for herself. I like to think that Francis wrote this poem so that the reader has this same experience. At the end, we are in the snow, too, and have to think of what kind of person we are. Do we have love to give? Or are you willing to take it from whatever creature crosses your path? Do you know what you are?
If you enjoyed this poem… you can read more by Vievee Francis here.
If you are looking to engage with poetry more this year… try this challenge where you memorize and recite one poem a month. Maya and I are trying it!
If you have stuck around since the beginning in 2022… thank you. We are looking forward to another year of gathering with you.