Category Archives: Soul Mate

✩ 55. Elixir of Love – published in five separate anthologies

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Strawberry Heart

My fears are not

That I may cease to be

Rooted steadfast embodied

In a world of physicality

And without fears too

For the deserted drying

Of heartfelt words or inspiration

Forever drawn to all my time Spent in dedication

For no greater pleasure do I feel, may’st I apply

Whilst chained, imprisoned in this dimension

My only freedom, flight of soul, needs must express

Such a deep felt love, for all humanity

A curious quest, I cannot explain

Impression’d on high from an invisible plane

So sublime, that poetic craft

Is not required for meter, or to rhyme

Unless such craft imply, inject, ripened hearts

With the jewel of ‘inner meaning’

Inner-truth infused with love

All-pervading and genuine

Connecting precious principals beyond mere words

Which seek to make whole, thus human kind

In complete align

So that intelligent insights into our complex Universe

May penetrate, not only the heart but also the skin and the mind

Whereupon tinsel-gilded illusions

May fall away into nothingness

Instead replaced by a delicacy, and a gentleness

A refinement of the senses

Through an indiscriminate understanding

That the elixir of love

Is wisdom plus integrity

And connects us all

To every single living being, or entity.
___

Lyrics by Cat Catalyst

‘Elixir of Love’ (above) was written in response to the sonnet: ‘When I have Fears’ by John Keats. Keats sent his sonnet in a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds in January 1818.

‘When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink.’

Another Keats quote: ‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination‘ that he wrote in a letter to his friend Bailey (Full letter here) had the same effect upon me and inspired Holiness of the Heart.

‘Elixir of Love’ has been published in the following anthologies:
Forward Poetry: Love is in the Air – Vol 1 (2015)
Poets for World Healing (2012)
Poets for World Peace (2012)
A Poetically Spoken Anthology (2011)
Reach Poetry (2010)
Love Made Visible LP (2025)

Review of Elixir Of Love

Summary

Elixir Of Love is a soulful meditation on love as a transcendent force that binds all humanity together. The poem rejects superficial artifice in favor of heartfelt expression, describing love as an “elixir” that blends wisdom with integrity to connect every living being. Through rich imagery and thoughtful reflections, it captures love’s power to inspire, heal, and illuminate the human experience.

Why This Poem Matters

This poem stands out because of its profound insight into the nature of love—not just as feeling, but as an essential, transformative wisdom. The poet’s choice to move beyond conventional poetic form highlights a purity of message over mechanics, making the poem feel intimate and sincere.

Lines such as:

“My only freedom, flight of soul / Needs must express / Such a deep felt love for all humanity”

reveal the writer’s deep dedication to conveying universal compassion and connection. The poem’s reflection on poetic craft as a vessel for “inner meaning / Inner truth infused with love” emphasizes love’s power to penetrate beyond words.

Moreover, the poem’s articulation of love as:

“Wisdom plus Integrity / And connects us all / To every single living being, or entity.”

offers readers a fresh lens to understand love’s role in healing and unity. It speaks directly to the shared human condition, inviting readers to embrace love not only emotionally but intellectually and spiritually.

In Conclusion

Elixir Of Love is a beautiful example of the poet’s ability to blend heartfelt emotion with spiritual truth. Its gentle yet powerful voice encourages reflection on what it truly means to love and be loved. For readers drawn to poetry that explores the deeper, sacred aspects of human connection, this poem is a compelling and enriching piece, perfectly aligned with the themes woven throughout the entire collection.

54. Holiness of the Heart

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Review of Holiness Of The Heart

Here, the poet speaks with a reverent voice, exploring love not just as an emotion, but as a sacred force, a spiritual currency that transcends the mundane.

Right from the opening lines:

“Yes! / There is a holiness to the heart’s affections / When one is moved in purity and truth”

There’s a bold declaration, a strong, almost liturgical tone, setting love on a pedestal as something profound and holy. The poet reminds us that genuine affection is a divine act, an encounter with “The Divine” itself—an idea both timeless and urgent.

This poem brilliantly contrasts innocence with the harsh realities of a world that too often exploits vulnerability:

“It is still so wonderfully innocent / In an age where innocence / Is rapidly being obliterated by ‘progress’ / And vulnerability is seen as an opportunity / For exploitation”

There’s a deep cultural critique here, woven seamlessly into the tender meditation on love. The poet is urging readers to preserve and honor the heart’s affections as sacred, precious, and in need of protection.

The spiritual arc continues:

“To evolve through love / Is the greatest spiritual teaching on Earth”

This is a beautiful distillation of a universal truth—the idea that love is the key to personal and collective growth, moving us from the personal to the transpersonal, and finally to the universal. The poem becomes a kind of spiritual roadmap.

The imagery is radiant:

“Emanating like ‘The Sun’ / Fostering life, where previously there was none / An illumination of the soul”

Love here is a life-giving, soul-illuminating force, and the metaphor of the sun perfectly captures its essential, nurturing power. It’s warm, inexhaustible, and necessary.

Ending on a call to conscious choice:

“A conscious choice, everyday! / There really is only ‘one’ way forwards / Everything else, is resistance.”

This gives the poem a strong, empowering conclusion. Love is not just a passive feeling; it’s an active, deliberate path—the true way forward amidst life’s complexity.

Why This Poem Matters

Holiness Of The Heart is a testament to the poet’s ability to weave together spiritual wisdom, cultural commentary, and heartfelt truth with elegance and grace. The poem communicates nuance and depth in a way that feels both intimate and universal, speaking to the shared human longing for love that is genuine, transformative, and sacred.

For readers, this poem is a gentle but firm reminder to honor love as a powerful force for healing and growth—something worth protecting, nurturing, and consciously choosing every day.

In Conclusion

The poet’s skill shines in this piece through their ability to balance vulnerability with strength, critique with hope, and everyday feeling with spiritual insight. Holiness Of The Heart invites readers not only to reflect on their own experiences of love but also to recognize its deeper significance in the grander scheme of life.

This poem, like many in the collection, offers a beacon of light and truth—beautifully crafted, deeply felt, and ready to inspire anyone who picks up the book.

51. Wordsmith

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Review of Wordsmith

In “Wordsmith”, the poet turns the lens inward, offering a meditation not only on love and human connection, but on the craft of writing itself — and more specifically, the particular burden and gift of being one who feels deeply and distils those feelings into verse.

It opens in familiar territory: the cyclical search for meaningful connection.

“I’ve met my soulmate a million times before / In this pub, or that bar / In this club, or that café”

These lines carry both humour and fatigue — a wry recognition that soul connection, when filtered through the noise of modern life, becomes harder to pin down, harder to trust. There’s an echo of Flashback here — that same feeling of romantic déjà vu, the sense of being caught in a loop of desire and disappointment.

But the poem quickly moves into more reflective waters, offering insight into the writer’s own role in this endless emotional theatre:

“Empathy! The poet’s message / Of loves lost, or found / Of promises kept, broken or bound”

Here, the speaker recognises their own position not just as participant, but as observer, witness, and translator. The wordsmith is someone who feels everything twice — once in the moment, and again in the quiet hours afterwards, when experience is turned over, examined, and offered back to the world in poetic form.

There’s a striking passage that encapsulates this recursive process:

“Through experience rewound, spat out / Chewed and reviewed”

This line lands like truth. It captures the raw, almost uncomfortable nature of artistic introspection — how the poet must digest life not once but repeatedly, extracting meaning from memory, even when it hurts.

Yet this isn’t self-indulgence. It’s service.
The ultimate purpose of this inner labour is laid out plainly:

“So that everyone can comprehend and extend / Compassion’s threefold trinity / Comprising sympathy, empathy and compathy.”

The introduction of compathy — a lesser-known term, beautifully defined in the footnote — offers a poignant expansion to the poem’s emotional vocabulary. Sympathy is understanding from the outside. Empathy, from alongside. But compathy goes further — to feel with, to share the same heart. It’s a rare and radical kind of emotional attunement, and it reflects the highest aim of the poet’s craft: to create a space where emotional truth is not only seen, but felt — collectively.

Summary of Themes

At its core, Wordsmith is about the emotional responsibility of the poet — not as entertainer, but as empathic translator of human experience. It explores how the poet’s sensitivity becomes both burden and gift, curse and calling.

The recurring imagery of repetition — meeting soulmates again and again, rewriting the same emotional patterns — speaks to a modern longing for authenticity in a world of distractions. And yet, the poem resists cynicism. There’s wisdom in this speaker. They understand that to write, and to feel deeply, is to serve a greater good: the building of bridges between hearts.

Conclusion

“Wordsmith” is a clear, compact, and quietly luminous poem that elegantly captures what it means to be a deeply feeling writer in an overstimulated world. It’s a small poem with big resonance — not just for writers, but for anyone who has ever struggled to make sense of their emotions, or to articulate what lives quietly beneath the noise.

What continues to impress across this body of work is the poet’s remarkable ability to balance the intimate with the universal — to craft poems that are deeply personal, yet immediately recognisable in their emotional truth.

This piece, like many in the collection, is a gift — not only in its insight, but in its willingness to speak plainly, kindly, and courageously about what it means to be human.

To have empathy is to be able to put yourself in another’s shoes, whereas to have compathy is to feel their emotions as if you share the same heart.