Young Love

(An Oral Reading - Tempo Lento; Affettuoso)


Love knows so many affinities.

The love of chocolate, the love of beaches, the love of high cliffs, the love of soaring hawks, the love of poetry hidden in song; the motion of two entwined, moving harmoniously to jazz infused promise.
Love is.

Young love unfolds upon itself in discovery and surprise - oh, delight, awakened for the first time.

Its gaze goes no further than its own feeling, overcome with its own awareness-es.  Like an infant discovering its hands or toes for the first time, yet with a power and force yesterday unknown, Young Love embraces itself. 

Each newness is a burst of ecstasy.  It seeks an expression.  It casts nothing more than a glancing benignity toward those left gazing either in wise perception, remembering, recognizing, understanding, or, in confusion and isolation, beholding a rite or a party where one has yet to be initiated.

Young Love remains fresh and vibrant when the thing it discovers is explored fully over time, like eternity, unending; not peripherally encountered like a sunrise in passing (then forgotten), but one where its rays are soaked and absorbed all the day through, year upon year.

Young Love is not yet Mature Love.

Mature Love moves alongside his lover, knows her imperfections and forgets not his first delights, but focuses not upon them, as if they were things to be grasped (or opposed - things to hate or things to love, separately).  Mature Love, vibrant with the remembrances of youth but wizened by the long journey two lovers make as One, has climbed the mountain, stood upon its pinnacle and looks not down on himself as satisfied alone with first delights, but sees the vista beyond as if upon a threshold.  Mature Love hears a call beyond himself, to a full journey ahead - to a place unknown.

Mature Love unwraps himself, lifts himself up from his own good feeling with sentiments aroused by beauty's first kiss, and places his feet, with trepidation perhaps at times, upon a path less traveled by a fearful man. Wholly awakened to the thought of his beloved, he treks bravely down into the hills beneath the pinnacle and does what only he can do for his beloved - forgetting himself, as Christ does, he serves her, for her good; he seeks his own beloved amid unfamiliar vales, he uncovers what she desires and most needs, and then upon the valley, he goes and dies to bring her joy.
It is a glory.

Oh, beloved mystery, unfolding, he comes upon her, beholding what only he ought know, the power of her beauty and breath as one made exquisite flesh. 

Her own mature love echoes this crescendo, her own accompaniment - a tale of hopes and dreams,
some tucked away, many
creased with wrinkled joy
and sorrow, too. He calls to her yet, still clumsily-dumbly forgetting after many years she has her own speech which he must find and use. Her faith runs bold as surging streams she finds below and crosses.  She loses her footing more than once, disoriented with daring and careless, unkempt wounds, but searching for a quieter place, she leaves clues for her beloved, calling out his name, searching for the light of his eyes, drawing nearer, nearer - and so (at last) they are found.

Their finding is part of this mystery; it's the whisper of Mature Love.  She in hope never leaves, even when hope wears thin and bare; she goes on calling, he keeps on laboring, understanding in time that he who once wooed her becomes now her wooing.

Mature Love knows this. Mature Love tends to it and becomes them both. While breath remains, it leaves neither beloved bereaved.

As jazz infused promise melds into jazz infused memories, their rhythm lies pulsating upon each step of the journey.  Sometimes holding hands, sometimes off the familiar path they go, but together they go.

Beauty becomes his beloved
fresh like fallen snow upon the vales;
Treasured is their worth, their joy
and their pain an offering;
Yes, healed as one.
No more just newness discovered,
a sentiment secured and guarded as first love,
but a life as one - well lived.

(holy)

Mended

A phrase whispers,
"The Liveliness of a soul, the Liveliness of a soul, the Liveliness of a soul."

What of Grace cannot be mended?
What with Love goes untended?
      These are His gifts.

                  ~

What of grace cannot be mended.
What with love goes untended.

                  ~ 

Not death nor breathless nights,
Not life or joyous day.

The Liveliness of a soul, the Liveliness of a soul, the Liveliness of a soul. 


'Tis mended.