Accepted Offering Poem by James Walter Orr

You kneel before me,
Like a supplicant for my love,
But look around you!

Do you not see the shattered remnants of my heart?
They surround you now, the scattered hulks of what
Was once the loving center of my being
And is now the lonely wreckage of the past
From which all life has fled
And left an empty war-zone,
Cold and bleak
Beneath a storm-tossed sky.

Yet when I see you kneeling here before me;
When I see the anguish showing on your face,
And your fingers halfway closed like empty talons
Clutching for the things we shared before
As you await my words of anger and reproach,
My voice muffled with continuing despair
How can I not acquiesce?
Again I ask you, look around you
At the crumbling walls and empty staring windows,
At the desolate crumbling dwellings of my soul.
Is there a way, you think, that we could ever
Repair the whole and total devastation
That racks our lives and subjugates our hope?

But yet, when I can still enough my pain
To look upon your form, so fair and pleading,
Filled with remorse and offering your all,
I also note the grass is green beneath you,
And though the storm is poised above the wreckage
Of what we had before, does not that torment
Come with the spring, when love can start to grow?

That fine line where the agony of leaving
Is all mixed up with the pleasure of our loving
And the memories cannot be separated
From the present, as you kneel there in the wind.
And as the wind sends curling tenuous tendrils
That fan the smoldering embers that lie sleeping
In what was once the raging cauldron of our hearts,
There is no choice, I love you once again.