16/02/2023
Take a moment to read The Sea In You xx💓. Beautiful poem.🦅
THE SEA IN YOU
When I lie next to you under the moon,
I do not know who I have become unless
I move closer to you, obeying the give and take
of the earth as it breathes the slender length
of your body, so that in breathing with the tide
that breathes in you, and moving with you
as you come and go, and following you, half in light
and half in dark, I feel the first firm edge of my floating palm
touch and then trace the pale light of your shoulder
to the faint, moon-lit shadow of your smooth cheek,
and drawing my finger through the pearl water of your skin,
I sense the breath on your lips touch and then warm
the finest, furthest, most unknown edge of my sense of self.
So that I come to you under the moon as if I had
swum under the deepest arch of the ocean,
to find you living where no one could possibly could live,
and to feel you breathing, where no one could
possibly breathe, and I touch your skin as I would
touch a pale whispering spirit of the tides that my arms
try to hold with the wrong kind of strength and my lips
try to speak with the wrong kind of love and I follow
you through the ocean night listening for your breath
in my helpless calling to love you as I should, and I lie
next to you in your sleep as I would next to the sea,
overwhelmed by the rest that arrives in me and by the weight
that is taken from me and what, by morning,
is left on the shore of my waking joy.
…
Title poem from
'THE SEA IN YOU' :
Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love’
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press
…
Moon in the West
Photo © David Whyte
The Flaggy Shore
Co Clare. August 29th 2017
Falling in love is experienced physically like a real ‘falling’, the disorienting sense of ground giving way toward the mysterious tidal pull of the other, or more disturbingly, falling toward a part of our self we had never quite understood, toward a form of happiness we often feel we do not deserve, and to a depth we did not feel we could venture to breathe in, ‘as if swimming under the deepest arch of the ocean.’ There is also a strange, tidal coming and going of edges and boundaries, influenced by the weather, the moon, the stars: everything it seems, but our own will.
In love we subvert the everyday structures of the life we had built so carefully and raze them to foundations on which a new, shared life can be built again. Unrequited love has its own form of fearful falling, but falling into a full felt and reciprocated love we face the most difficult, most revealing and most beautiful questions of all: are we large enough and generous enough and present enough; are we deserving enough, and ready enough and robustly vulnerable enough, to hold the joy, the future grief, and the overwhelming sense of privileged blessing that lies in that embrace? DW