Venus, Eros and Oshun

Osun the gatekeeper of love and beauty

I am in Love with Venus, Eros, and Oshun
I am in love with the most intimate of human emotions.

You know true love. The kind that makes you stay by someone through thick and thin. And never think of bailing.
The selfless type.
Not the type that is lip service or puckering of it. And actions and words do not align.

Love that does not think of the material, self, or what it stands to gain is what warms my heart. 
The type that makes a person take a bullet for you.
Or throw themselves at a raging lion just to save you. A type that constantly thinks of you first.
I have often watched people close to me, who profess love but are only in love, with what they can get from you. 
And how hard they try to make you believe the dross they spew.

I come from a culture that has become increasingly materialistic and short on integrity. This type of love has become so scarce, that it would be easier for the oil wells in the Persian desert to turn into water. Or the oil spills in Nigeria's delta region to be cleaned up.

One could proclaim that true love is dead, or that love that exists is painted only in "bling! "For better to stay, for worse to leave"

Yet, I am an optimist. And believe true love lives among us. Love that is blind to one's standing in society or what it would profit.

In recent times, however, I have also become fascinated by the genre of writing-Erotica. 

Erotica is derived from the Greek ἔρως, Eros "Desire"- An artistic work that deals with erotically stimulating or sexually arousing. We must make a distinction that Erotica has high-art aspirations which differentiate it from pornography

 I have often wondered about the difference between Eros and Love. But found out, they are actually the same. Eros is the Greek god of Love while Aphrodite is the goddess of Love. And Cupid and Venus are their Roman counterpart. While Oshun is the Yoruba equivalent
Love would be boring in absence of erotica.
So love and erotica are Siamese twins. Venus young daughters.


 Ha! I feel like the earth is moving under me now!

If you Google the most famous love poems, none has been written by any poet in the 21st century.

One begins to wonder if there ever will  be a
Pablo Neruda- I do not love You Except Because I love you
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Love's language)
E E Cummings - I carry your heart with me 
Edgar Allan Poe- A valentine
Elizabeth Barrett Browning- "How Do I Love Thee? from her collection- Sonnets from the Portuguese
All who have written famous love poems.

Then again, I may be wrong, anyone who knows a famous poem by any 21st-century poet. Please, say it now.

If you read Pablo Neruda's "Carnal Apple, Woman Filled, Burning moon", you might agree with me, that it is classic erotica and love at play.

Carnal apple, woman filled, burning moon 

dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,

what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars

What primal night does Man touch with his senses?

Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars

Through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:Love is a war of lightening,And two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.

Kiss by Kiss I cover your tiny infinity,your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages, and genital fire, transformed by delight,Slips through the narrow channels of blood

To precipitate a nocturnal carnation,

To be, and be nothing but light in the dark.

In my opinion, our life should imitate his art.
As a writer very wet behind the ears, this is the kind of work I would like to be known for or associated with-erotica.  
Works of the most intimate human feelings and relationships. 
Human relationships make our life better and worth living or not.

Some have said that chivalry is in a convulsing dance of death, Have champions of love poems become comatose too?
I certainly hope not. 
I hope there are at least a couple of  Pablo Neruda in this century.