Love Will Not Give Up
/Poetry is the language of love. Throughout the ages, philosophers, poets, storytellers, writers, and everyday people have turned to poetry to express the power and beauty of love: how it grips us and leaves us breathless before beauty, how it wrenches our hearts and blinds us to consequences, how it inspires us to face immeasurable odds and take on impossible tasks, how it crashes our world even as it it touches our souls and elevates our lives. Nothing has the power like love to push us over the edge into an empty abyss or sweep us into pure bliss.
We can only point our finger to something ineffable and invisible that beats our hearts and turns our world. We rely on metaphor and music to restore us to the truth of our being and remind us of the reason we are here in the world. This one little word, love, holds all that is, all that we are, and spans infinite universes.
Ultimately, there are no words to express or contain love. Poetry is the closest we can get. And this is why donning the mantle of the poet is a daunting, and perhaps futile, task with little reward. It is a task usually taken on because the poet has been taken over and has no choice but to write what sears the heart and sings in the soul.
All my writing, all my poems, are a merely a practice, a meager effort at putting love into words. I have often run afoul of my craft, tried to put it down, tried to go back to my everyday life and be content with my days. But the force grips me. My muse will not relent and I have to write, even when my words land short of the mark or fall on deaf ears.
I offer these poems to all who wonder, in the dark hours of life, if they have been left out or if they are unworthy of love. I offer them from the simple lesson poetry returns to me over and over again: even when I give up on love, love will not give up on me.
