Inspired by More Words from My Heart of Cleophus P. Franklin Jr.
Few notions are more wondrous than the hope that two hearts can meet across a lifetime, brought together by a union that defies reason, yet is not quite explained by it. Cleophus P. Franklin Jr.’s More Words from My Heart conveys this eternal longing in his poems, reminding us that love transcends clocks and calendars but flows freely through the centuries, like starlight that finds us long after it has departed its origin.
In his poem Soul Mates, Franklin speaks of love that transcends time and space, a love that endures in memory, dream, and hope. It is the sort of bond that refuses to perish, even when chance, distance, or even existence itself appear to drive two hearts apart. The term “soul mate” itself evokes something eternal, something ordained into the very fabric of things. Similar to starlight, it can journey across great distances, but it still arrives, lighting up our lives when we least anticipate it.
Perhaps the most powerful thing about Franklin’s writing is the way he combines the privacy of individual experience with the commonality of human desire. We might not all have the same words for it, but we have all experienced that tugging, the feeling that somebody, somewhere, should be walking this path with us. And even when the roads split, we continue to carry with us the recollection of having known this other person like a map through uncharted territory.
The starlight metaphor is particularly compelling. Stars teach us both about durability and distance. They twinkle across millennia, but what we glimpse is a light from the past traveling through time to our moment. So too does love tend to endure in remembrance, fantasy, or expectation, long after the event has been lost. Franklin’s poems prompt us to recognize these echoes not as loss, but as evidence of love’s resilience. The existence of starlight guarantees us that what truly is never vanishes.
Love that transcends time also reminds us of faith and patience. Franklin’s poems have an undertone of faith, faith that love, once kindled, cannot really be extinguished. It may change, it may withdraw into memory, but it never dies. This way of looking at things is comforting, particularly in times of loss or separation. Even when we part ways, we retain the essence of that connection within us, which propels us onward like a star that illuminates the night sky.
For readers of More Words from My Heart, this is a romantic and deeply human theme. It reminds us that the bonds we most treasure are not thin threads but strong strands woven into the tapestry of our existence. To believe in soul mates and starlight is to believe in the idea that love has a vocabulary outside of time, that it is both here and everywhere, now and forever.
Maybe that is poetry’s greatest beauty: its power to find expression for what seems impossible to put into words. Franklin’s lines remind us that love’s radiance, like starlight, can be slow in traveling, but when it finally arrives, it makes everything it touches radiant. In that radiance, we realize the truth that love, in its essence, is ageless.