About Love to my Teenagers

Love is bigger
than you and me
It is an ocean
of surface
and, depth
and, weight
pressure and temperature.

Love is gravity
that pulls the ocean
to ebb and flow
rise and fall
make waves

Love is a place
where life thrives
teeming multitudes
competing in tide pools
a place of no folly
a humble abode

Love is time
of kind-patience
of long-suffering
caters not to weak
it carries forward
faith and hope
in changing tides.

These are just words
frail and thin
from an old man
who felt it again and again
drowned in that ocean
crushed in that gravity
put in my place
and found time cruel
until love awoke within.

Copyright © 2010-11 Patrick Darnell