If Our Love Were a Mountainside

If our love were a mountainside,

I could lean-to the logs and haven there from homelessness,

if it were a river, I could make fertile my long-barren fields.

But oh, it is not.

Our love is a hidden kingdom,

a laughter sounding from across the valley.

And my journeys, thus, must be through a dusty land,

through towns stained with blood and injustice,

that none can forget or name outright,

and even while knowing the way to riches,

still I must beg for traveler’s bread.

No, our love is not a garden set apart,

where we may lie together,

giving balm of tenderness and balm of courage.

Our love is the inner nectar,

the sap that sings within the stones,

it is the trembling nearness of all things to the heart,

the wisdom cry the world can no longer hide.

Having met with this, even once, let me be true to it,

passing lightly through life’s rubble,

and free from doubt amid the crowd of haunted eyes.