Love Song from the Bards

Love is deeper than any sea that

I thought I would ever scavenge,
A rough and roiling voyage—
Not a frolic in a pond
Which only breathes of fronds and polliwogs.
Love is not Ophelia’s barge entombed
With weeds which drifted her unto death.
Love leaks in floodwaters of despair, yet
Builds a lighthouse to guide the valiant bark
Home to its craggy shore.
Love is not the perpetual trumping by hero’s antics,
Nor of schoolboy’s daring
To prove the heart for a flutter
Of a simple kerchief or the wink of a darling Calypso.
A steadfast hymn is the longest song—not a Siren’s call
To dash one’s heart, not an Antony’s pact with Cleopatra
To die for drama’s sake to prove that the world is cruel.
Monotonous seems the daily embarking and the disembarking in
The mornings and the nights,
And persistent are the tides that ebb and flow with lunar moods—
But passionate sings the deepest rhythm that few can ever hear
In the crashing waves of dear devotion that
Sanctifies my reason to dive headlong into the depths—
To sink, to eddy, to float, to stroke—
To be one with the currents that satisfy my reason to weave
The net that holds my love as a constant trophy.
6 January 2010