What Love Leaves Alive

Love said to Death,
“You may close the door,
but you cannot command the house
to forget the sound of footsteps.”

And Death answered,
“I have taken the voice from the room.”

“Then the room shall remember,” said Love.
“The chair shall remember the one who sat there.

The table shall remember the hands that blessed the bread.
The heart shall remember what it was taught
before it knew it was learning.”

For love is not the breath alone,
nor the warmth of a hand,
nor the name called across a familiar room.

 

Love is also the courage
that rises in us when we are afraid;
the tenderness we offer
because tenderness was once offered to us;
the laughter that escapes
in the very place where grief had made its home.

 

The dead do not return to us
as they were.

They come as the patience
we did not know we possessed,
as the story we tell again,
as the kindness we give without being asked,
as a light passed from one life
into another.

 

And if the waters of sorrow rise,
let them rise.

Love has crossed deeper waters than these.
It is not the body that keeps the flame,
nor the stone that guards it,
but the living heart
that receives it
and carries it onward.