THE PASSION

 

 

A Poem suggesting a move to another intensity: like old men, while we walk with the "bottoms of our trousers" rolled, we continue exploring before going back home. Sleep will be good. Then.
 

 THE PASSION



 Love is most nearly itself/ When hereand now cease to matter./ Old men ought to be explorers/ Here and there does not matter/ We must be still and still moving/ Into another intensity... T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”, Four Quartets


Too late to be afraid, I have left for places
to explore, posted my address “nowhere”
and there will be no returning. Not here.

Not now, or anywhere. I have built me
caverns of love walled with sound, echoes
really, of cathedrals of thought and feeling

neatly folded into my threadbare knapsack
of everything that is old and do not matter:
Only the love, barely the love, all the love.

What is it? Where is it? How is it made?
How long will it last? Why call it a passion?
In that hill, on that rugged cross, it was. It is.

Where I shall go, I shall be asked: How long
did it take for you to know how to get home?
I always felt the tug, but never its intensity.

---Albert B. Casuga