I adjure you, my Love, sing with me the love of us.
Celebrate what you write in your heart, the dangerous passions you had once hidden.

We are large, contain multitudes. I sleep and awake beside you.
We are legion, and are one. I work and eat beside you.
We are porous and overlapping. I weep and laugh beside you.

And I know that the hands of the divine are our own. Hands under heads with care, and hands in warm embracing.
The hands I touch, all are perfect, and there is no one lesser among them.

And I know that the spirit of the divine resides in those whose lives are opposed to my own. The hands red with blood and warring belong to those who also are holy.
The hands I touch, all are perfect, and there is no one lesser among them.

Hieroglyphs of Kronos, are faded with time.
Zeus his son, is ashamed by war-makers’ wrath.  
The old gods are faint, weary before love.
Its song and its celebrants have tamed them.
 
The gods breathe the fragrance of us in our love and know it and like it.
Intoxicated, they succumb, drinking from us like mead.

Who is this coming up from the desert, with columns of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, in power and pride? All of these I feel and am, so too these I feel and am.

My respiration and inspiration I watch, the beating of my heart I listen, the passing of blood and air through my lungs, I feel.
These to me are my scriptures, they bring me to you.

Behold, you are comely, my beloved; behold, you are comely; behold, you are comely, my beloved; behold.
Be not ashamed; and force not the course of the river.
your eyes are like doves.
your hands are like doves.

The beams of our ribs are cedars; our thighs cypresses. All tinder without you.
The doors of the village houses stand open and ready for you are above gold: you are the mother in war, the faithful and pious amidst violence and you carry me in you.

I am a rose of Sharon, the paddy of rice, the drought dried clay of Losotho all at once and I carry you in me. We roses of valleys, my beloved is mine, and I am his, he who grazes among the roses.

Bring the orphans of war, exalted like palm trees in Gaza, and as a rose plant in Jericho, as a fair olive tree in pleasant fields, and may they each grow up as trees by the water.

Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I hear them hum in your presence. Each one its own universe, expands, builds worlds. And gives rise to lovers who sing of you.

(No doubt I have now died myself ten thousand times before.)
I have watched my own death via satellite, in grainy images, over the cries of the young, and in the silence of infrared.

All that are of the earth shall turn to earth again-appearing and departing, this is the lesson the monk offered his life to learn and as he gave himself to the hungry demon met Buddha. Urge and urge and urge and life to life all goes onward and outward, all is change and nothing collapses without stopping life is change.

I bequeath myself to the dirt. May I grow from the grass I love, the grass we once read on,
may I grow maize and dates, in the shadow of Nineveh giving home to worms.
Should you want me again, look for me in the plowshares, in the boots of those who march not to war.

My Love,
no heart can think upon these things worthily-even cupids wonder at their craft. Divinations, wisdoms, dreams, moons, poems: these all are in vain.
as far as the heart may fancy, so love’s horizon outstrips.
even were my soul to cover the whole earth and fill it, still love’s parables would humble.
And yet still,  

I opened my mouth, and said: I celebrate us, I sing us

 

 

 

 

Ryan McGivern


With text from “Song of Songs”, and “Sirach”
and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

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