Not that kind of love poem

I ask, “With what eyes should poetry look at the harshness of our world?”

I reply, “With eyes that refuse to look away.”

I refuse the morning’s offer of a love
poem. It sulks as it should, a muse 
spurned. I knew a love once that was 
a dark star in the morning sky: more 
prophesy than presence. A harbinger
of silences. I say I want to write 
about everything that is wounded: 
earth and bones and truth and 
light and certainty. Is that not love 
enough, love poem enough? 

Don’t we know breaking only 
because we once knew love?

I remember wholeness. The kind
through which universes moved, 
without subtraction. The kind that
created more universes without
reduction. The kind that, even as it  
fell apart, still dreamt of salvation.
Isn’t memory also a love poem, 
without lines, without direction? 

Otherwise, what separates us from 
clouds – placeholders in the water 
cycle? We too lead back to what led 
to us. In between, this amorphous 
being, this hurting, this failing, this 
forgetting, this fragmenting. This love. 

I ask for a poem like the skin of a 
snake. The kind that will be moulted,
will be renewed, as wounds heal, as 
spring comes, as a dark nimbus must 
rain, as words must make way for 
words, as life must make way for life,
as love must make way for love. 

The sun tells me even a lament must 
end in hope. Derive a possibility. 
Everything is moving, I say. Snakes 
and worlds and wounds and water 
and words. And love. Look how hard
everything is trying to fall into place.

#Poetry