To Concede

Becoming Elation

0402.2025

(a four-part meditation on love and transcendence)

I

My last love ripened,

then withered on an unrequited vine,

and it was the fruit of that vine—

filling the cup of love’s want—

that left me drunk on its final flame.

I carry its want—still alive with its need—

pressing hard on fragile conviction,

threaded with memory and history,

leaving my longing loud and alive,

buried beneath the ache of this heart.

⸻

II

Who knows what love is?

Perhaps to know

is to feel it, first—

unimagined and strong—

the one pull toward a life worth living.

Perhaps it’s to touch the sun

and die by its fire-beam and heat—

to fall to the wound of its golden arrow.

Or maybe it’s the long, exhausted sigh

while held in the arms of night,

then letting the moon’s kiss

set you free from yourself.

Perhaps it is death’s own moment,

when your soul is mirrored—

or losing time, entangled in atoms,

suspended among the stars.

⸻

III

Never knowing love,

I’ll become a honeybee—

carrying life from flower to flower,

especially the dying and loveless

beneath dry soil and fading fields.

The ones reaching, barely breathing,

pressed beneath the weight of stone—

oh, cruel journey of life!

to let their lives begin in shadow

while being beautiful,

but unseen and ignored.

⸻

IV

Let me be the bee

that finds the beauty in flowers

during their time of dying—

so my elation survives

in another form of love—

a kind worth carrying

in the grace of surrender

and purpose.

m.c.f.

❦