To love and then to love bones under the sun

You might call it morbid but I enter this phase of life more fully cogniscent of the fact that investing in love of people in fraught with the fact in the end death will separate you. As a Christian, I don't always see that separation as final but it's still sheddingly painful. Why might we wish to take the risk in these circumstances? Is it worth it. The answer I believe is yes. Scars and craters of loss in the heart can be redeemed. The cost of not loving is the greater in the cold light of day. This poem is a reflection on that.

To love and then to love bones under the sun

The joy, spontaneity and sheer love of childhood
Wrung dry by my darkness, yours and the walls of the ditch,
Until the sunshine of those days
Fades, like a half remembered number plate.
The tent of the presence is down
Mire on the broken cords like oil spill slopps.

But the cold floor doesn't feel safe:
Cynicism is not the bottom line
In a mind
Which can't forget
Its soul conscience
And all what we know we can be
Have been.
Could be:
Whispers of chains unseen;
The bully that threatens you not to move.

Draw me a map of what happened since then
Go back through every piece of tissue remade
Trace the contours of the stream
As it makes new tracks in dire earth.
Eyes recalled from grandiosity and self hate.
Til shoots of a kinder green, out of the charred earth, reach out to the airs.
And are met anew.

A new tent that might fall over again.
It's not safe from the cold knife.
Structured around people that blow away
But if I bury my love in the earth
Til you return
My faith is in a safety I can never know
Let me leave it out on the tar,
Red pigment above ground
Where we love with no guarantees
The only kind this life under the sun will ever see