Jonathan Wilkins, "Love Poems"

Jonathan Wilkins, by himself

I am 67. I have a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons; I love to write. I am a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstone's bookseller and former Basketball Coach. I taught for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. 

These days, I regularly teach at creative writing workshops in and around Leicester and I take notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. 

I have always loved books and reading, but nine years at Waterstone's nearly put paid to that!

I love to write poetry. I feel this is the best way to show emotion in writing and it gives me a wonderful sense of well-being.

I’ve had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and had several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. I have had some of my work placed in magazines and anthologies and also exhibited in art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station Waiting Room. I have my writing on various blogs.

About Love Poems, by Jonathan Wilkins

This is a collection of love poetry written since 2011. The poems show how love can affect us all in so many different ways. This includes the pain that love can bring: the pain of loss and the bewilderment we sometimes feel when we are in love. How should we react to love's embrace? I am not sure I will ever know. What I do know is that I am in love and have been since I met my wife.

Below, you can read a poem from the collection. 

From Love Poems

GARDENING TIMES

I was weeding in my garden and between
the digging and forking and ripping
out of roots and grass and weeds and alien 
shoots I thought how good it would be if we could 
pick the parts of our memories we wanted 
to keep and throw away the rest. I know
that we need bad things to make us 
realise that what we have is good, but when the 
memories scar and refuse to let us move 
on then why should we keep a hold of them? 
How do we dispose of our dark times?
Too many lie back in the memories of the 
past, content to blame and fixate and never 
move forward because they see no point 
when in fact the very reason we have these 
memories is to show us what has been and 
what can be, so we live with hope afresh.
Why stagnate when it is your future that sets you free? 
Remove the weeds from your memory's soul, 
plant seeds and saplings and foster each with care. 
New dreams can and will come true, so dispose of the 
creeping roots that threaten to choke the 
fresh and embrace the life you deserve if 
you maintain your garden's fancy vagary.