then love comes

It's definitely cheating to post the same poem today that poetryisnotaluxury posted, but I am such a sucker for sonnets, and Carol Ann Duffy is just so good. I hadn't actually read this one before, and it is really wonderful.

Thought of by you all day, I think of you.
The birds sing in the shelter of a tree.
Above the prayer of rain, unacred blue,
not paradise, goes nowhere endlessly.
How does it happen that our lives can drift
far from our selves, while we stay trapped in time,
queuing for death? It seems nothing will shift
the pattern of our days, alter the rhyme
we make with loss to assonance with bliss.
Then love comes, like a sudden flight of birds
from earth to heaven after rain. Your kiss,
recalled, unstrings, like pearls, this chain of words.
Huge skies connect us, joining here to there.
Desire and passion on the thinking air.

—Carol Ann Duffy, "Rapture," from Rapture, 2005.