Love Wants To Know How

 

This poem makes the liminality of the turning season almost visible or sayable. The Sabbath for which we prepare is also a liminal space, not just a day to cease work but a hyphen to the sacramental. 

I invite you to “Go now,/quickly and with great force,/toward what burns in your dreams/at the dying of the year.”

“Love Wants to Know How”

author unknown

Autumn comes with its riot of death,

its clarion bells of color,

drives the living green to ground

even as it thins the veil between worlds.

The visible and invisible walk now together

with arms outstretched over fields

where workers hasten to the harvest

none may divide against itself.

So: where are you in this?

How long do you loiter

between the said and unsaid,

the done and undone,

between the half and true rhyme

of a life answering a life?

Geese mark the sky with dark wedges,

call with harsh tongues

to what thrives at the margins

of all we so reluctantly receive.

Go now,

quickly and with great force,

toward what burns in your dreams

at the dying of the year.

Who can say?

Perhaps you reap the whirlwind,

perhaps the harvest—

but is it ever enough to not know

the bonds and bounds of what will one day

forsake you for the grave?