- True Love -

A Valentine.

I can just hear you sigh.

Like most of us, you think 

Hallmark, Hollywood, saccharin, 

all so ignobly imprinted in

the cultural flotsam 

of the word 

valentine.

Doubtless 

you think romance, 

Eros, when I’m getting at something

beyond shiny surfaces, ever-

after concepts.

Something that pulls one

to another one like earth pulls

life on earth to her rocky

fire-breathing self. 

For it is

a force of nature,

a sacrosanct law,

this draw to another,

to the singular beauty 

that is true of him, her, 

them, however unaware

they may be as to what is

essentially true and 

deeply beautiful 

of them. 

(Or you, 

routinely made

castaways of the

marrowed paradise 

to which we 

are born.)

It is gold

one must mine,

sifting through the 

silt of streams rushing, 

ever rushing — 

of hurts, longings,

mute to the world, 

music you alone can 

hear; of loss and ridicule, 

sorrows that somehow you

fathom in the dark vast pitch 

of their gaze; of currents that

speak primal tongues of long

ancient wanderings, fecund 

wilderness in every touch; 

of differences written 

in the code of 

forgetting 

what it is 

to be as

formless 

as air. 

So familiar 

in this breath drawn 

with your own. 

It is rugged endurance

when we are sold

glitter and glue.

Grit borne of 

mountains far

beyond reach 

— scale —

so mighty.

We’re loth to speak the word

love. Knowing well the desolation

of its absence, we are not yet

conversant with its presence

in polite conversation.

Trued, it forsakes nothing

but the interlope

of doubt and

falsehood.

For it cannot be

otherwise. It sees

with the muscular eyes

of the heart that can hold

brokenness with such 

finitude, such delicacy,

no matter the tempests,

the masks worn and 

shed, the distances

traversed, blazed,

in this, the smallest

of cosmic spaces. 

It is the loss 

of self finding itself over 

and over again 

home. 

It is Valentine’s Day

and this is my valentine.

A remonstrance to the

astroturf of this terrain.

It's not pretty. 

It’s heavenly.

For it is grassland, 

sweeping, savage, 

holy and alive.

It gets muddied, parched, 

rutted with use and age and season, and still, 

it reaches again and again up 

to the sun kissing it 

softly, 

surely, 

for it knows

this flesh as 

its own. 

—Eve Moore

Photo credit: Eve Moore

**

Eve Moore: Once a professional writer of advertising, I saw the light & it has shown me words of a different nature. And so I take them down & offer them up. And all is well.

This poem was submitted exclusively to CrystalWind.ca by Eve Moore.