Two Cures for Love by Wendy Cope

Getting someone out of your head can be one of the most dispiriting and time-consuming tasks in life. Little else can be so conflicting.

You know you shouldn’t be flicking through their profile pictures, or reading through their love letters (depending, probably, on which generation you belong to), but they’re already in your head day and night. What harm could it do to indulge yourself?

Often, it can seem as if time, and perhaps a measure of self-restraint, are the only remedies for heartache. Yet Wendy Cope’s poem Two Cures for Love reminds us that perspective is also a crucial ingredient.

Two Cures for Love

1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.
2. The easy way: get to know him better.

Write Your Medicine Prompt:

To start, choose an image that catches your attention, evokes a rumbling of emotion. You may know why, maybe not. Sometimes it is writing itself that will help you see why that image resonates.

It can be an image in your imagination, a pic from your cell phone, or a random picture from a magazine.

The idea is to explore, in poetry, how this image makes you feel. Often the image that comes to mind or captures your attention is speaking to you, represents a part of you that wants to be expressed. In this context, writing is the deepest form of listening. 

Here is my image:

Here is my poem:

Like the wave
A memory of a dream
Swimming the depths
Surrounded with whales
I am afraid
I feel free

What is your image and poem?