In a world of rape and tweets, what's happened to handwritten love letters?

There’s something heartwarming about the thing made over time with tenderness and given to a loved one. Hallmark cards have nothing on a child’s personal creation made with bright crayons for his mom. Nor do tweets and SMSs, filled with “mwah” and gratuitous images of flowers. Imagine coming home with a crown of flowers for your love with the dew still clinging to the petals because the stems were plucked and carried from the gardens with such care.

And the love letter stroked into being like feathers smoothed on to a hand-drawn creature and given flight? I still have a letter written to a sweetheart, originally penned on arty paper (remember that world before liquid crystal screens?). It took me weeks to write.

“I’ve cut you gladiolas. One for each of the seasons of this love for you: Your chuckle murmuring bees, drowsing, wings tingling the skin. Your mouth and cheeks, shimmering in summer, tasting of honey. Your hair, a warm, scented prayer or rich black ash, light as a spirit, lifting in a winter wind. Your body tousled, tanned, sliding strewn with leaves through my deeper mind, their crush scenting everything I feel. But no Ophelia anymore. There’s only spring, and your streams fill the ciborium that is the heart. I’ve brought you gladiolas. Four — one to frame each side of your head. For I’ve found the face you were searching for, the one you had before the world began. Look, here it is.”

“Look, here it is”, refers to the poem offered to my sweetheart at the time (a reference to a Yeats poem). It was scrolled and placed into a bouquet of four tall stately gladiolas, one for each season of my love, an idea for a gift which perhaps some may find mawkish in a world of tweets and Facebook. Yes, it was a poem, and I have removed the verses because “nobody reads poetry anymore”, or so the truism goes. Then, on giving her the flowers, I read her the poem out aloud.

Why the reference to Ophelia, the love of Hamlet who went mad and died? Because the woman I wrote this for was a childhood victim of incest, now on the road to recovery and learning to live and trust again. She understood the allusion.

So I’ve written this because of the current flurry of blogs about rape. The issue of assaulting other people, dehumanising them through unspeakable acts and the statistics on the abuse of women is appalling, far beyond my comprehension. It must be written about, screamed from the rooftops, as Jennifer Thorpe does, though it makes her enormously unpopular among some. The inevitable problem is, that by focusing on the inhumane, one risks being defined by that discourse. Things should be made with care, and it’s useful to go back to the origins associated with that word care, the Latin caritas, from which we get charity, love.

I have loved and written about many people in my life. This includes women. My mother is still alive (85) and I haven’t seen her in many years. Though I phone her regularly, I live with the fact that I may never see her again. From China I wrote her this poem, which she liked, and she felt I had understood something.

Memory of Leaves
Hundreds of feet down the path the leaves and bark
Finally muffle the clattering rickshaws and the last
Of the straw hats and wheels bob out of view.

Here, half a world away from home, I halt,
Listening to my mother returning
Within, walking and nodding wisely
To conversations she can no longer hear.
Her hearing aid buzzes and clings to a world
That’s fobbed her off. The silence is no longer
Something to be cradled and nursed.
Under her the leaves glimmer with memories
Of leaves crackled through, wintry drifts
Of serrations and veins splintering like parcels
Of tiny bones silently piled into graves.