'Love Come And Gone' Poem by Ray Lucero

You were not always gentle but you never failed to love as strongly, as you did everything, you loved me.

It was a fire in you and it pained. I think you hated loving, were afraid of it, as though it might expose some tender scar that never truly healed. But I was grateful even for the cruel, insensate passion that lashed against me. Perhaps I needed punishing. My own love was not always gentle.

You were a god I had to own, keep to myself and could not even share with you. When we first joined our love a trumpet sounded from a storm that rode the shoulders of the night. I lay sheltered, glad to be afraid, in your arms with your lips hard pressed to mine and I drew warmth from you that would never cease protecting me against the rages of boiling from without and from within.

You were my other self, my only love, a self I found and had not known was lost until that moment when I felt you grow within me. It was as though I had created you. No separate lusting flesh was ours that night but one united.

We could dare anything and did. We dared to be reborn in the music of the morning, dared to die a little when the cello sounds of twilight sang. But Love's a celebration not a diary of days. You felt the weight of my dependence and the candle we had lit was not enough to see by. The dearest lovers do not walk in unison or it becomes a prisoner's march.

So we moved on, two rivers forking out from their main stream. You to your work and I, a woman what could I do? I tried to love. I never found myself again as I had lived in you, but I found love of sorts to ease the pain of living.

(Poet unknown)

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