Hans Ostrom’s “The Cherubs, The Harbors” reads like an intimate letter spoken aloud to a longtime partner. The title already joins the heavenly and the workaday—winged cherubs beside working harbors—and the poem keeps those registers in conversation. Its address to “my dear” sets a tender, conversational tone, yet the imagery quickly expands that intimacy into something architectural, geographical, and even mythic. The central idea is not simply that the speaker loves someone, but that love has become a shared territory—a “province” inherited from unlikely, quasi-divine sources—and that the right response to such a gift is humility, care, and an active wish for the beloved’s good. The speaker does not ask for anything for himself; instead, he hopes to become worthy and asks blessings to travel toward the beloved.
The poem moves in six unrhymed tercets. Its lines are roughly comparable in length but not metrically regular, which lets the sentences breathe like natural speech while the stanza breaks create small pauses. The opening line has an almost iambic lilt, but the poem repeatedly loosens that pattern, choosing the variable rhythms of direct address over strict meter. Enjambment is central: “Your sweetness / unfurls yards of woven sky / that luxurious tailors applaud” carries the act of unfurling across the break, so the syntax itself feels like fabric being drawn out. The absence of end rhyme does not make the poem flat; instead, sound echoes internally through alliteration and assonance—constancy and pavilions, sweetness and sky, luxurious tailors, patient as the moon. That sonic texture makes the praise feel lavish without ever tipping into singsong.
The opening draws on building and cloth. “Refurbish” turns hope into a structure that can be repaired and renewed, not a vague feeling. The beloved’s “sweetness” does not merely exist; it actively “unfurls yards of woven sky,” as if affection produces the very atmosphere. The image of “luxurious tailors” applauding is both elegant and whimsical—sky is treated as fine cloth, and love becomes a craft judged by its beauty. These words—refurbish, unfurls, woven, tailors—create a sense of ongoing labor and art. Love here is not a single moment but something maintained, measured out in yards.
The middle of the poem turns from textile and architecture to travel. “Harbors have / looked out for our best interests,” the speaker says, personifying the ports as protectors. The list of names—San Francisco, Stockholm, Mobile, Tacoma, Barcelona—grounds the poem in specific real places, yet their variety also suggests a life lived across coastlines and continents. Harbors are thresholds between land and sea, departure and arrival, and in the poem they become witnesses to the relationship’s “long way.” That long journey gives weight to the speaker’s gratitude; love has been tested by distance and movement, not just felt in one place.
Then comes the surprising declaration: “Love / is a province we inherited / from an oligarchy of cherubs.” The political word “oligarchy” crashes into the softness of “cherubs,” creating a mock-heroic tone. The phrase suggests that love is not entirely earned—it comes as an inheritance from a whimsical ruling body of winged figures. Yet that very absurdity may be the point: such a gift is both ordinary and inexplicable. The speaker’s response is humility. He wishes to be “as wise / as you deserve, as patient as / the moon, as extraordinary / as you.” The three comparisons escalate from wisdom to patience to the beloved’s own extraordinary nature, with the moon providing a quiet cosmic standard. The wish is not for possession but for worthiness.
The final three lines turn into a blessing. The speaker desires “all blessings / to come your way like voices / from a choir, secrets from a wizard, / sung light from behind blue mountains.” The similes are synesthetic: voices belong to sound, secrets to hidden knowledge, sung light to a fusion of hearing and sight. The blue mountains close the poem at a distance, as if the blessings originate beyond ordinary reach. What makes the poem significant is its fusion of intimacy with grandeur. It treats love as a real, traveled, repaired thing—full of harbors and textile work—and at the same time as a mystery inherited from cherubs. The poem’s originality lies in those surprising leaps: luxurious tailors applauding sky, an oligarchy of winged infants, harbors with benevolent interests. Such images rescue the love poem from cliché and make devotion feel both hard-won and unearned, both daily and legendary.