June being the month of weddings (notwithstanding the Memorial Day Weekend weddings in Elizabeth’s and my families), another love poem seems in order. Turn off the news; turn off the television; turn away from the checkstand magazine rack with its litany of celebrities rebounding from terrible break-ups. For all of that reality, the truth is, plenty of couples pull through and there’s still plenty of love in the world. Sometimes you just want a happy ending.

“Love Grew On Us,” first published in Burn All Night (1998) and then “stolen for inclusion in 2015’s Love and Its Interruptions“ falls in that happy-ending category. Not in a schmaltzy, unlikely way, but with its quiet persistence.

Elizabeth describes it as “the story of a girl becoming woman.” The form of the poem reflects its theme, as she calls it “skinny and tightly rhymed” in order to reflect “love’s privacy.” When I see the he-said-she-said stories at the checkstand, I often think, “But no one can know, ultimately, what goes on in a relationship except for the two people involved.” Love is private, indeed.

“Love Grew On Us” tells in its few words of this “private intensity of love [which] gets into and out of problems but arrives into a long happiness.” Read it over today, or let Elizabeth read it to you, and put a little love and happy-ending into your heart.