"To my wonderful wife, I wish you the happiest of birthdays, Sheila. May your special day be filled with much happiness, love, peace and generosity.
When I first saw you, Sheila, I was afraid to meet you. When I met you I was afraid to kiss you, and when I kissed you, I was afraid to love you. Now that I love you, I am afraid to lose you. You have beguiled and bewitched me with your purity and gentle innocence and your loving ways. I am mesmerized by your presence in my life, seduced by your enduring sensitivity and concern, enticed by your charm, ensnared by your brain and inner beauty and entrapped by your unstinting generosity of faith in me.
When I look into your eyes I see everything I ever needed. Without you, there is no me, no us, no purpose upon which to outlay love. That is what you mean to me; that and much more than I have words to adequately describe.
A very happy birthday, Sheila. You still look as beautiful as the day when we first met on Haworth Main Street. When you first approached me and said, 'You'll do, I'll have you!' you left me breathless and I've been breathless ever since with my good fortune. From the moment of our first meeting, our hearts, minds and souls fused into one enduring love that life daily celebrates and death cannot separate. I love you Sheila Forde xxx.
No birthday to a sweetheart should pass without a poem of love. This is a short poem which I wrote several years ago when I was thinking of all the things that make me love you. Happy birthday, Sheila. Bill xxxxxxx
'What makes me love you' by William Forde:
(Copyright William Forde 2014)
'You want to know what makes me love you,
I do not have the means to say.
There are no words to match my feelings,
no marriage between what is, what may
have passed between us then,
what weds us to the future now,
what makes me yours, what makes you mine,
what makes my loving you divine.
I just know that I love you.'
William Forde: November 29th, 2017.