Love Song

By Dorothy Parker 1893–1967 Dorothy Parker

My own dear love, he is strong and bold

And he cares not what comes after.

His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,

And his eyes are lit with laughter.

He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—

Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him.

My own dear love, he is all my world,—

And I wish I’d never met him.

My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet,

And a wild young wood-thing bore him!

The ways are fair to his roaming feet,

And the skies are sunlit for him.

As sharply sweet to my heart he seems

As the fragrance of acacia.

My own dear love, he is all my dreams,—

And I wish he were in Asia.

My love runs by like a day in June,

And he makes no friends of sorrows.

He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon

In the pathway of the morrows.

He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,

Nor could storm or wind uproot him.

My own dear love, he is all my heart,—

And I wish somebody’d shoot him.

Dorothy Parker, “Love Song” from The Portable Dorothy Parker, edited by Brendan Gill. Copyright 1926 and renewed 1954 by Dorothy Parker. Reprinted with the permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker (Penguin Books, 2006)

Biography

Dorothy Parker’s biting wit made her a legend, but it also masked her lonely struggle with depression. A member of the Algonquin Round Table group of writers, she wrote criticism for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and later the New Yorker. During the 1930s Parker moved to Hollywood, where she worked on such films as A Star Is Born, for which she won an Academy Award.

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