Love's Testament

Sweet hour of dawn unfolding on the air

Its whisper spawning bird-song to the breeze

The dell, a sea of mist and memories

Rousing within the heart a wordless prayer

Here pain and pleasure mutely synchronize

Surging within like only love can do

Where hunger, having, holding, missing you

Alloy; a raw and tender paradise

And I will hold you just to taste the grief

Of letting go; its ache love’s testament

As joy and sorrow, the heart’s filament

Rends and mends in bittersweet relief

For joy alone or grief cannot exist

It mingles like the morning with the mist

Moments; oh, mighty, subtle, sheer deluge

Breathing to bloom the bud-let tightly clenched

Yet nature’s roving thirst is never quenched

Its force an unrelenting subterfuge

We stoop to trace the petals on the lawn

Mourning the haste at which the hours pass

The prophets understood ‘all flesh is grass’

Our sojourn like the mist upon the dawn

The heart, a chalice for life’s offering

Runs over with the gifts that life employs

We drink its bitter gall and honeyed joys

Its beauty and its sorrow-suffering

As love, a soulful, stirring melody

Inspires us to press on faithfully

Hope in an arabesque spiral of calm

Trembles anew upon the morning brink

We cannot touch the haze of muted pink

Nor can we clasp the moments in its palm

Yet, in this gossamer incline of Time

Goodness and mercy shod each gifted hurt

And thus we laugh, willing to kiss the dirt

And thus we weep; relinquishing its rhyme

To rivers rushing out to twilight’s edge

We cannot keep, but simply touch and taste

The silver mist of mercy’s moment-haste

Before they fall like seeds beneath the sedge

Yet oh, within its beck I’ve come to know

I hold to feel the hurt of letting go

© Janet Martin