! Love You Poem by Michael Shepherd

Dearest T…,
Great to hear from you!
I’m glad the hospital didn’t confiscate
your mobile and your laptop
this time…

but – what can I say?
I’m sorry to hear that
your break-up with the new bf
was so violent – well, at least
you’re highly trained in law h h h…

but I’m glad to hear
that you changed your mind
when you got to Zurich…
I’d like to know more of that;
but won’t ask just now..

and I’m touched that the two poems
on the riches of the self
were the first poems that you read
when you came back into the ward…
should I be glad, you silly girl,
that they ‘made your mascara run’…?

Oh dearest T - whom I love, as the self in all;
who’s stretched the love of parents, friends,
beyond all reason, to that place where only love
is left… to do what love can, may, might, do…

you’ll go on testing the – let’s say –
Absolute’s – God’s – love for you
with tests that only someone so loving,
so intelligent, so aware, so stubborn for the truth
could devise, as self-destruction…

until the day, when you’ll accept
within that sober, loving self we know so well,
that you, yourself, are but that absolute, that self, that love
which you have no need still to test; nor can;
until that day when, out of love,
your self tires of your tricks…

keep me in touch? for there are some of us
who know that love is boundless;
useless, T, to test our love for you;
and you’re too bright (alas?) for me
to tell you yet again
the consolations of philosophy..

I’ll simply write,
Look after yourself;

and look, then, at those words
as if I’d never seen or read them once before;
fall still; wish you, too, stillness;

there is no more for words.

Michael