To announce the fullness of love,
you must first suffer
the pain of being
pried away
from the sweetness of things.
You must dance
with the withholding of desire
and brush shoulders
with the emptiness
of long nights
and lonely beds.
You must,
before giving yourself over
to the delights of love,
forsake the beating
of your own heart
and experience the nakedness
of being alone
in the crack of existence,
estranged even from God.
Before reveling
in the many raptures of love,
you must surrender all hope
for the outcome of your choosing
and allow, instead,
the wild tide of life
to crash over
your days and weeks
and minutes and hours
as it pleases,
chaos and all.
And that’s before
the real trial begins:
the letting-go of expectation –
the expectation
of a love fulfilled,
of a holy and sweet
communion
of compatible souls.
Yes, just before
the love breaks through,
you must sacrifice
your wish for it,
plunging into the darkness
of an uncertain fate
and a resigned,
but heavy,
confrontation
with the disappointing
realities of life.
It is then,
in the surrender
of all things dear,
that the tide turns
and washes over
the pieces of your life
in a furious, urgent sweep –
bringing together
the disparate parts
and carrying them to shore –
safely, intact, whole –
and you along with them –
a victory of resuscitation,
a narrow escape
from the waters in which
you would have drowned.
And now,
in the lightness of air
and on the firmness of ground,
you find yourself
coming alive –
breathing in slowly and shyly
the miracle of what has been
granted to you,
the discovery of
a joy
which ran so deep,
it nearly disappeared –
which, now,
in its quiet ways,
leads you
into the light,
into the sun,
into the place
where the love you sought
waits,
warm and unabashed,
longing to pull you in
with open arms.
