We Begin Again

The night was breathing music
through hidden lungs-
in every small breath,
empires trembled,
in every fleeting moment,
the dust of heavens stirred.

She moved through this sacred world
before us,
leaving behind divine residue
and pollens of intimacy-

So we did not invent love-
we entered it.
It is carried invisibly
except by those who see it.

It made us gentle,
so we could suffer the mouths
that mean to harm it.

She precedes us,
so we can know her,
in sorrow and in suffering,
wounded but living,
small but stubborn-
in little joy.

We were set upon the earth,
to stay awhile,
as light threading through branches,
the span of a single breath.

Love does not turn inward
for its own keeping-
we fall into the next seed,
asking what we may give.

We must witness suffering
without turning away,
to know that we are not
separate from it.

For love is not possession-
it passes itself onward through us,
so no wound will stay wholly
in the body made to bear it.

So there will be no private grief
among the living.

For mercy has a human heart.

It embodies compassion within us-
and learns to break for what cannot mend.

But sometimes there is also
a terrible fire moving through us,
untamed,
and unwilling to spare.

It possesses us
and surges through instincts,
dark and destructive.

So the rose of us is never far from sickness,
and its petals never far from ruin.

Sometimes love opens already wounded.

What wounds us most are the wounds we make-
our conscience keeps the sharpest blade.
It is the judge we cannot bribe.

We enter cities not measured out
by wounds,
but by the distances held between us.

Distance is not accidental,
something holds it there.

We entered life through another’s pain.
Then learned to call
ourselves separate.

Love is hard to speak.
It is beyond language.

The possessive noun
does not carry it,
only the open heart.

Like sunflowers, we bend through seasons,
turning towards light-
we learn, we forgive, we begin again