Danil Rudoy’s shortest poems in Love Is Poetry compress love, irony, memory, self-knowledge, artistic vocation and partnership into four to eight lines. This page presents twelve complete poems in their order within the collection, preserving the author’s text and dates.
Short poems in Love Is Poetry
Love Is
A four-line comic dialogue in which romantic declaration meets the ordinary question of dinner.
The Gamut of Truth
Eight lines of ascent, money, hope, uncertainty and a final judgment about truth.
My Angel
An eight-line love poem about striving, coping, elopement and mutual hope.
The Street as a Sequence
Four lines that flatten a city street and a turbulent relationship into parallel sequences.
Everybody’s Folks
Seven quick lines of social media, attraction, provocation and comic bravado.
A Sure Tell
A four-line miniature in which Renaissance beauty survives only as a fragment in memory.
Years of Silence
Eight lines on memory, sleeplessness and a love repeatedly cherished and cast away.
Poems About Love
Eight lines on sacrifice, forbidden love, lost love and the dangerous authority of the beloved.
To the Poet
A four-line ars-poetica miniature about feeling, contradiction and the defiance of art.
Confidence
A four-line dialogue about action, Providence, self-confidence and self-knowledge.
Army of Two
Eight lines that define love through perception, social performance and durable partnership.
Goethe and Me
A four-line declaration of poetry’s sovereignty, addressed to the devil and crowned by Goethe.
Love Is
“My love is growing day by day;
Does yours keep up, sir sinner?”
“How could it not? And, by the way:
What do we have for dinner?”
2012
The miniature pivots from an elevated declaration to appetite in a single exchange. Its ABAB rhyme gives the joke a clean formal landing.
The Gamut of Truth
We’re flying lower, we’re flying higher;
A fall becomes a command to soar.
She went for cash, but myself’s no buyer:
I don’t relinquish my hopes for more.
Perhaps I’d better await the morning:
It may surrender the missing clue.
This girl is always a healthy warning;
Perhaps she’s crazy; at least she’s true.
2012/2013
Vertical motion becomes a language of self-command, while money, hope and uncertainty lead toward the poem’s final value: truth. Read the critical analysis of “The Gamut of Truth”.
My Angel
How hard it is sometimes to strive
And not be fallen prey to coping!
You screamed at noon. But now, at five,
It’s time to reach for some more doping.
Let yet unmarried couples’ hive
Be buzzed with prospects of eloping –
You keep, my angel, us alive,
And I, my angel, keep us hoping.
April 2013
The repeated address “my angel” binds survival and hope to a relationship already marked by strain, intoxication and the prospect of elopement.
The Street as a Sequence
The street is a sequence of stairs and levels,
The feelings inside me are totally flat.
She has been my angel, she has been my devil,
She’s never been anything better than that.
Fall 2009
The poem places urban geometry beside emotional flatness, then compresses the beloved into the opposed figures of angel and devil.
Everybody’s Folks
It started out with Twitter,
It darted through the bitter,
And now I know: I lit her.
But down with those who flatter.
I’ll throw another at her,
Cause such are things that matter
To everybody’s folks.
2014, October 2017
Rapid rhyme and social-media diction give the poem the speed of a boast passing through a crowd.
A Sure Tell
Among the shards of time arose
An image worthy of Renaissance.
I think I recognize her nose;
Alas, the rest is evanescence.
August, October 2017
Memory produces one surviving feature from a vanished image. The Renaissance reference enlarges the beauty of what time has almost erased.
Years of Silence
Years of silence in a line, –
Unforgettable, at least.
Faithful memory ignites
Recollections of the past.
And the heart shall not decline
Such a loving, little beast
Fed on scores of sleepless nights,
Spurned and cherished, caught and cast.
October 1st–2nd 2016
The poem gives memory the action of fire and gives love the body of a small persistent beast sustained by sleepless nights.
Poems About Love
Love has been quite inhumane as an idol,
Urged sacrifices, another décor.
Often in deeds, and in thoughts suicidal,
We’re at the mercy of those we adore.
It’s in their eyes that we’re looking for Eden,
Much like the victims who cherished the most
Poems about love that’s forbidden,
And poems about love that is lost.
Summer 2019, May 3rd 2020
Love appears as an idol demanding sacrifice, while forbidden and lost love become the forms most intensely preserved by poetry.
To the Poet
Humiliate and dignify!
Don’t question what your heart may feel.
Our art is blind and does defy
AI by general appeal.
Fall 2009
The four lines place poetry inside contradiction and emotional freedom, with the closing line turning artistic defiance toward a modern technological opponent.
Confidence
“What is the hardest?” “To act.”
“Something you don’t buy?” “Providence.”
“If there was one thing you lacked,
What would it be?” “Self-confidence.”
2019, May 5th 2020
Three questions move from action through belief to a final diagnosis of the self. The closing rhyme with “Providence” makes the answer especially compact. Read the critical analysis of “Confidence”.
Army of Two
What is love? It depends
On the power to see
All the posing you slew
In the corporate hallways.
That we’ll never be friends
I can well guarantee,
But an army of two
We will keep being always.
April, November 19th 2019
The poem defines love through shared perception and closes with a military metaphor for two people who remain a coordinated unit. Read the critical analysis of “Army of Two”.
Goethe and Me
Choke on your oil and gold,
Devil. I guarantee:
Poets will rule this world,
Poets like Goethe and me.
Spring 2019
Material wealth and the devil occupy one side of the poem’s challenge; Goethe and poetic authority occupy the other, giving four lines the scale of a manifesto. Read the critical analysis of “Goethe and Me”.
From Love Is Poetry
All twelve poems belong to Love Is Poetry: Rhyming Poems About Love Life. Their small scale makes rhyme, tonal turns and final words especially visible. Longer poems and sequences appear in the English poems by Danil Rudoy.
Text and citation
Copyright © Danil Rudoy. The poems are published here as the author’s canonical texts. Short excerpts may be quoted for criticism, scholarship, teaching and literary discussion with attribution to Danil Rudoy and a link to the relevant poem fragment on this page. Full reproduction requires separate permission.