IMOGENE’S NOTEBOOK
Love’s Layers
A poem
I never really knew what love is
until I felt regret
for all my taking,
my excavation leaving clay vessels broken.
So eager to unearth the Pharaoh’s keep,
I brushed aside millennia of midden,
whose story is the story of humanity
read by prophets picking through love’s layers.
Like all things we drink,
I thought I knew love’s taste,
but it was my air unseen, blue within it.
Mom’s tears, too, unseen, her catharsis
for resentful obligations
pressing like piling laundry and hungry mouths;
Partner’s unseen devotion sworn on
flesh pressed into flesh,
devotion eroded by age, betrayed by Ego’s quest;
Pilgrim’s unseen worship, strange,
evangelizing to save, still,
death taking;
Life kicking up dust that sticks;
Paradise denuded by my own appetite,
grief’s cocoon, the last refuge of the mournful.
Dark. Still. Sealed in.
Me keeping.
How long? Unseen.
Love’s spring trickling, just enough,
Each layer of pretense wetted away,
eventually emerging:
Absolution.
This poem was created in response to a writing prompt by
with inspiration from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem ‘Kindness.’
