Love and grief tend to leave human beings speechless. Under their spell, we still turn to poetry for words of ecstasy or consolation.
 
As we prepare to celebrate Valentine’s Day on 14 February, the AVBOB Poetry Project celebrates the stirring, tender love poems of Larry Schwartz, a poet and journalist born in South Africa who has been living in Australia since the early 1980s. After publishing a memoir called The Wild Almond Line (Allen and Unwin, 2000), his debut poetry collection, Padkos (meaning “provisions for the road” in Afrikaans) was published by Watermark Press in 2019. A substantial second collection, Small Mercies, followed in 2023.
 
“Padkos featured early poems, written from my mid-teens to my early 60s. Since its publication, and in particular since quitting work to care for my late wife Ramola, who passed in early 2025, I found the time to be more attentive to the sounds and words as they emerge. These were poems of great love for Ramola and the gratitude I felt for her love while she was still with me. I would greet her with poems I’d written as she woke. This was a love that was against the odds at a time when apartheid laws made it unlikely. We finally left our country in the early 1980s to be together.”
 
One of the loveliest poems in the new collection, ‘The Pledge’, responds to Christopher Marlowe’s famous ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’. While Marlowe’s shepherd promises his beloved beautiful adornments, Schwartz’ poem acknowledges loss and even inevitable separation. But rather than striking a gloomy note, this knowledge makes the poem all the more tender.
   
“We don’t write in isolation but are part of an ongoing community of verse and song. Sometimes we knowingly acknowledge this. This poem is a contemporary response. I was writing of a great love that endures despite the challenges we inevitably face. I wrote it at a time when Ramola was in hospital with a brain tumour. I muttered those lines, as I recall, sitting beside her in the ward. That love was undiminished, as strong as ever. That was the heart of the poem.”
 
Schwartz is both humble and carefully optimistic about poetry’s ability to inspire and console.
 
“I remain convinced that poetry is not just a literary endeavour. It should not be addressed to poets only, but to whoever resonates. It seems that the poems are reaching readers elsewhere whom I’ve never met. If these poems can reach people like this and be of use to them, I am honoured. More than this I don’t ask.”
 
Asked what other rituals sustain him, he said:
 
“I walk along the creek near our home for a few hours every morning with my labrador pup Kelly, stopping to do tai chi along the way. I’ve been learning to play the oud, and have resumed playing guitar. Friends have suggested that some of the poems may be reworked as songs. I’m working on a collection of the poems written for and inspired by Ramola over the years. Perhaps the process is helping me as I grieve. I’d like to think that we might experience not just grief but gratitude.”
 
In the next few days, find a love poem that moves you deeply. Then write a love poem of your own in response to it. For inspiration, Schwartz’ collections are available from mike.kantey@gmail.com.
 
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition closed on 30 November 2025 and reopens in 2026. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za and register to enter.