This has been my favorite poem (by someone else) for as long as I can remember. My mother gave me this book of various poems by many different writers when I was a child. Somehow this one stuck out:
What Any Lover Learns
Water is heavy silver over stone.
Water is heavy silver over stone’s
Refusal. It does not fall. It fills. It flows
Every crevice, every fault of the stone,
Every hollow. River does not run.
River pressed its heavy silver self
Down into stone, and stone refuses.
What runs,
Swirling and leaping into sun, is stone’s
Refusal of the river, not the river.
- Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems 1917-1952
INTERPRETATION & EXAMPLE:
River: My Love for her.
Stone: Her.
Her Love for me: The splash of river, rising to the sun.
The river is my love, while the stone is her.
My love will never run.. never ever go dry..
no matter how many stones I pass..
I will never let this river dry up
because I have too much of me to give.
The stone may not be ready for me
the right stone..
But I will always..
always be ready for her.
- b.pG
I love this poem too. However, I have always seen it as saying that the interaction between two strong forces – the water and the stone – is what leaps in the sun, is what love is all about – the ways we push each other and create a splendid moment that sparkles.