Tess Lockhart
  • God Poetry
    • A Preacher's Prayer
    • Advent
    • Advent Watch
    • Ordinary Advent Time
    • First Christmas Post Husband Mortem
    • Christmas Bread
    • Ding Dong Dung
    • Christmas Credo
    • Incarnation Narrative
    • Starlings in Epiphany Snow
    • Evensong in Bleak Midwinter
    • Imposition of Ashes
    • Lenten Ruth
    • Langston Hughes on Maundy Thursday
    • Maundy Thursday's Scattering
    • Good Friday Tenebrae
    • Gardening Holy Saturday
    • Mourning, Holy Saturday
    • A Little Hilaritas What If
    • Milton on Easter Monday
    • Pentecost Invitation
    • For All the Saints
    • Winter Solstice
    • Evening Prayer for the Beloved
    • Incarnation's Repair
    • The News Was Not Good
    • Just Jump Already
    • Job's Modern Lament
    • Uncle!
    • Worship
    • St. Valentine
    • Response to a Dr.'s Rhetorical Question
    • A Prayer of Praise
    • Renunciation and Adherence
  • Marriage Poetry
    • A River of Words
    • Beloved Baptism
    • Anniversary Gift
    • Aching Pain
    • Disappointment for Nothing
    • A Lament of Recognition
    • A Marital Parable Revealed
    • Kissing Death
    • Grief
    • Extinguished
    • Not Exactly Thecla
    • Rectify
    • Love Beyond Terror
    • St. Valentine
    • Divorce
    • Marital Haiku
    • A Mockingbird
    • All for Love
    • Love's Transubstantiation
    • Enough of Love's Ideal Poems
    • My Lie
  • Healing Poetry
    • A Child Abuse Victim
    • At Grandma's Funeral
    • Confronting Nothing
    • For Want of a Ritual
    • Gardening Widow's Weeds
    • Ghost Whisperer Grief Obsession
    • Grief Drought
    • Swimming with Grief's Fear
    • Five Years Post Mortem
    • Middle-Aged Dating
    • Fire and Water
    • Canoe Wrecked
    • Desire Beyond Reason
    • A Survivor's Haiku
    • Baptismal Renewal
    • Of Children, Pigs, and Priests
    • Sometimes
    • The Trickiness of Doors
    • Tenured Otherwise
    • Turtle Soup
  • Quotidian Poetry
    • Cookies for Dragons
    • Leaving My Daughter at College
    • To Mom on Her Birthday
    • On the Third Day
    • Ode to Bermuda Grass
    • Mundane Revelation
    • Sorry White People
    • Truculent Ode to Poetry
    • Twisted
    • DeFuniak Springs

Enough of Love's Ideal Poems

There's a poetry that comes with everyday life lived together in love
where the curves of one another's lives converge
and offer a tabernacle of shelter for communion
that ebbs and flows like the ocean upon the shore
and where shadows lie exposed in light,
offering the contrast of silence that births words.
Love's grandest words revealed in the beginning
sink into kenotic commonness unspoken
save with a knowing glance,
a comfortable touch of hand on knee.
Rhythm becomes the drying of dishes
that rhymes with the folding of socks,
and love's passion scanned in time stretches out between us
like afternoon delight murmuring into twilight’s slant.  

It is here that love’s sonnet lies--
in the buttering of toast in the morning’s dark
baked earlier in kneaded bread;
in sheets washed and gutters cleaned;
on consolation’s wet shoulder when loved ones die;
and in packages of handkerchiefs shared. 
It’s in emergency blankets and matches in plastic bags;
food for the journey and soup for the week ahead;
chicken broth of boiled marrow for a sick  mother, 
the setting of a celebratory fire. 
Words are but fragile, borrowed breath breathed in;
deeds their offered test of integrity breathed out.
Here is where true love, like poetry, lies--
in the quotidian details where there’s there there. 
 

                                  ©Tess Lockhart, 2013.  All rights reserved. 
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