Poem: If Life Be Love

If Life Be Love

To wake myself, wondering why 

I am so much less than I ought to be.

I wish to escape myself, my self-deceit,

My corporeal existence, aging, wrinkling.

Aching existence. Yet what is escape?

The mountains shadow me with all

My imperfections. I climb their heights

To see who I really am, exposed

To myself, to the world. Am I alone

In what I see, frail and broken?

Exposed on the lofty peaks I feel

The lightening rage as it strikes

My body, toppling me to the ground

As my hair stands on end, throwing me

Off the cliff only to have my heart

Restart again. Perhaps I think I’m ugly,

Worthless of all this pain.

Perhaps I have fallen from heights

Only to be born again,

Shocked into a new man.

In this forested grove below the summit

I see what I am and from

Where I did plummet.

I am alive in all this pain and joy

And I cannot die if life be love.

August 2023

About This Poem

I wrote this as a response to Coleridge's "On Revisiting the Seashore," and thinking about Moses self-doubt when called by God. It might sound like I was terribly depressed, but that's not actually the case. Of course, there are things that any of us can dwell on and become depressed, but that's not my wheelhouse. I try to stay positive. But I did hit on those things in this poem that do bring me self-doubt. I chose to be struck by lightning on a mountain top because that's my experience more so than a seashore like Coleridge. The photo is from a climb this past summer on Grandmother Mountain in Benewah County, Idaho.