Love’s Nature

By: Victoria G. Smith

 

Love is indivisible, gentle,
forgiving, always giving.
Like the magnanimous sea,
it is immutable,
incapable of dilution,
although it branches off
into different rivers.
Love is omnipresent—
able to be present
to everyone it blesses,
at the same time, every time.
It is our corrupt nearsightedness
that fails to see Love for what it is,
for our narrow minds and hearts fail
to fathom its elusive, sacred mysteries.
If this world were perfect,
we would welcome Love,
wherever it decides to rest.
It does no good to restrict it, bottle it,
nor dispense it with miserly will.
Like water, it seeps through the cracks
of our human foibles, filling the spaces
in-between: God is in the broken
details of our lives.
Because we lack, we aim to possess;
because we haven’t found,
we aim to dispossess others
of that which we yearn for ourselves.
Don’t we see—that which we seek
has been here, all along?
Isn’t this what is meant by the Kingdom
of God being here, right now?
May Love cure us of our deafness
to its sweet calling song,
of our self-inflicted blindness
to her colorful canvas painted
with the landscapes of our lives.
So beautiful.
So perfect.
So irrepressible.
(Copyright 2004 by Victoria G. Smith)

Poet’s Notes: I’d written this poem many years ago, but only had the opportunity to read it in a recent wedding. I thought it was especially relevant to that occasion because it was a gay wedding. I was surprised at the number of people who came to me afterward expressing how moved and touched they were by my words because as an artist, I didn’t think this was one of my better crafted poems—by which I mean it isn’t an intellectually sophisticated poem. Which reminded me yet again of my chosen calling as a writer: I write to express myself and to be understood so that I can touch other people’s lives, after all, and in this, the attendants to that wedding told me I had succeeded. I felt gratified.

One older man who was in a straight marriage was particularly effusive of his admiration for my poem as he said with all earnestness that emanated from his eyes, “Vicki, one just doesn’t come up with those words unless you’ve gone through a lot and know exactly what love means. Not a whole lot of people understand what it is to truly love. I wish there were more people who did.”

During this month of hearts, I hope that by my sharing of this poem to a wider audience, more of us could be empowered to understand and accept what Love is—especially unconditional love, and to realize how foolish it is to feel threatened by it when we meet it in the unusual places of the heart. (Copyright 2015 by Victoria G. Smith)