Strange Bird Reviews - [Issue #2]

On love poems and e.e. cummings.

Oct 01, 2025

For Grace,

Intro to October:

Welcome to the second edition of Strange Bird Reviews, my digital journal. In this issue I will share essays, prompts, and poetry, both new and classic from my Substack archives.

It is October, you know what that means. This month is considered the official spooky season. I like to ensure that most of the media I consume fits that genre. I prohibit myself from watching any non-horror movies, I make the playlist with Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus on repeat. You get the picture here. But October is also a special month for me. It is when I first started dating my wife, and it is when we later married. For me, October is a month of celebrating our anniversary alongside our shared love of being scared.

So, with that in mind, here are poems I have written specifically for her, spanning the last nine years we have been together. I will also explore what makes a love poem work, the logic behind it, and why I believe e. e. cummings wrote the greatest love poem ever written.

To begin, I am starting with the second poem I wrote for her, and also the first poem I ever considered good. And to bookend this October edition, I will be sharing the first poem I ever wrote to her.

Please enjoy, comment, share, sub if you aren’t already, etc. It would really help me to keep this dream alive.!

Thanks for reading Strange Bird Reviews! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Poetry:

Ethan H.
The clover—

You have reached a point in time
When life and stress
Hit like a bulldozer

With burning smoke,
Chalking air, and how do
You keep your composure?

Planting with roots that
Stretch grow and transcend
The precious little clover.

Her time is contentment,
Your struggle is change.
Which will soon be over?
My precious little clover?

Originally written March 2021.

Ethan H.
Alexa, play thunderstorm sounds—

I can hear the emptiness of the apartment,
back when you worked late nights, overnight, into mornings.
On my phone, I would play thunderstorm sounds as I slept,
even when it rained in April, even when it hailed.

Some days, I’d go days without seeing you, just barely
missing you like our lives were in perfect parallels.
I’d take a mark on my job record to kiss you bye.
A reckless gesture - I wanted you to feel my try.

You always had this chagrined affinity towards me,
like over-sweetened, overnight oats, we coalesced,
We studied each other’s silence, like lungs learning to breathe
and I learned your rhythms by accident – sleep, work
most days - I don’t even notice I move when you move.

*Originally shared to Substack on May 21st, 2025

Why e.e. cummings Wrote the Best Love Poem (and How You Can Use His Logic to Do the Same) - [Essay]

i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
-” e.e. cummings

Intro to the Greatest Love Poem

It is not a simple thing, my thoughts on writing poetry. Sometimes I view it as an informal logical reasoning exercise. With premises and a conclusion and a goal to make the best argument to feel a certain way. Not interpret it one way or another. I don’t care how the reader interprets it. There’s no wrong answer, but I do believe that there is a wrong feeling, if that makes sense.

I always knew I wanted to write, but I decided to write poetry specifically after purchasing an e.e. cummings book from a Half-Priced Books in my city. It had a poem called [I Carry Your Heart with Me(i Carry It In]. There were other poems, obviously, but this one stood out to me the most. It captured a feeling better than any other piece of work, in my opinion. It was written in a language that I could understand.

I could write about how he feels like in the poem, he is describing this early theory of quantum entanglement, where we carry the particles of those around us wherever we go. I do not think he was thinking that, but who knows. I could write about how, even though he tried as hard as he could to be authentic and against form, there are still elements of form here, almost like lyrics. The quote I shared above bounces up and down, not unlike particles probably bounce. Or I could write about how his work feels like an expanding and shrinking universe, moving from the small to the large. All of these are true, but even trying to explain them risks sucking the strange and yearnful whimsy out of it.

Take Him at His Own Words

cummings argued against conformity, but he did not against effort. He once said, “do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world-unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and to work and fight till you die.” That is what he thought about being a poet.

He was not trying to scare anyone away. Later in the same quote he states, “Does this sound dismal? It isn’t. It’s the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel.”

Poetry for him was work, discipline, and joy. He tested the theories of grammar and punctuation, but there is a science or logic underneath it, somewhere. It might look irrational, both the love and the love poem, but I think that is why this is the best love poem, in my opinion. It takes something most people view as irrational and illogical and explains it in a way that feels rational. And at the same time, something only he could express.

You Should Write a Love Poem Like Him Too

When I wrote my poem The clover— I had read many of his poems. I did not want to copy his style or his tricks. What I wanted was to capture how he writes about feeling. I thought about the small and the large, in my piece the clover versus the bulldozer. These images and emotions can expand and shrink in interesting ways. It is also interesting how something simple can carry something complex. Or how, like the concrete that shelters the clover, the environment can be both destroyed and rebuilt inside a single image.

That is the logic of cummings, and it is something you can use too. Begin with the smallest image you can hold. Let it grow until it touches something larger. Then return it to the person or the feeling that began it. Use playful language, but make sure it is your language.

That is how you write a love poem. That is why his still works.

Sources:

Cummings, E. E. “[I Carry Your Heart with Me(i Carry It in] | the Poetry Foundation.” [I Carry Your Heart with Me(i Carry It In], www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49493/i-carry-your-heart-with-mei-carry-it-in. Accessed 25 Sept. 2025.

More poems:

Ethan H.
Olive market (Something to tell you—)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Something to tell you,
When we were in Málaga, in the market
buying fresh olives, I wanted to tell you
that your back right shoulder peeked through dress
like warmth through a dissipating rain cloud.

But I kept it to myself,
because if someone else heard me say it,
whether it be a random stranger or
person guarding the oversized doors,
embarrassment would find you like it knew our route.

Instead, I took a bite in the olive,
forgetting about the pit. I grinded my teeth,
and you said, “There’s nothing you’ve ever had like this,”
pointing to the stained-glass market
as we walked away.

You laughed, and I purposefully
mistook what you said for your academic
overconfidence. But deep down I knew what you meant.
It was just the brine of olives,
and that makes more sense, I guess.

*Originally written March 1st, 2024, published on Substack April 2nd, 2025

Writing is a collective effort, if you want to join this strange poetry publication, feel free to reach out!

Contact: ethanhwrites@strangebirdreviews.com

Ethan H.
Distracted, just like—

like me you are distracted
it is because you do not dream(you do
but maybe you do not want to)and when we
take our morning walks is that when you sort them all out?
i spend them adding dividing
all the time we have left to spend(because i am

distracted like you)

i take such deep breaths trying to smell
if the air has any semblance of you and i
twirl my short curly hair wishing the fibers
were longer and yours(but i would not because
of the care you put into it and everything)still
we are—

distracted like football players in our heads
passing games/to defend/our mental health
with pink jerseys(or maybe gold and black)
choreographing every move
to a lofi hip hop beats someone else made(because you are

distracted like me)

distracted like someone reading scary stories
in the cold they make you taste/like winter mint/
your favorite in sweater weather(but not that cold
like the emptiness in old friends’ hearts
chill like our favorite valley because i am

distracted like you)

distracted like the drip paintings in museums
where we overpay for parking and nervously
do not touch them(like we are at my parents
when they are near)strangely making
things more awkward still we are—

distracted like our dog on a journey
i aim to get lost you to get steps in
(or are you filling all the bad dreams
in a cabinet to be burned like calories?)
i wish i could burn them with the body heat
of my spirit but i cannot(because we are

distracted like we both are)

*Originally written sometime, September 2017, edited September 30th, 2025

What’s next:

SBR #3 will be on the political poem.

Next month is November and there are key elections in the US. Not as critical or mainstream as the midterms will be, but still a bellwether for where our country is heading. Strange to say that about a mid-mid-term, but that’s just the US.

Some of my recent work has been more politically focused. My brother told me that when I write about politics, I am building a wall, and when I write about other topics, I am letting people see the real me. I want to challenge myself to do both at the same time. Because politics suck, but they are extremely important.

I have a couple of poets in mind to dissect for the essay and writing prompt, but let me know if you have anyone in mind. Thank you again for your time, support, and patience. It is thanks to you that I share my poetry, essays, etc.

Have a nice spooky month.