☀ Today's Poem: "Wild Love" Arda Collins

F.P., I am in love with you beyond anything I can imagine. The azaleas
on my street in the spring, the stones in the garden, or the end of the
driveway. Not nearly anything can make me love the way I do when
I'm with you and we sit next to each other at school. I think about you
in the tree where I sit in the afternoons and I can love you, though I
cannot imagine who you are. You are filled with contempt, but I don't
know that. I remember a forest near an ocean where I listened for the
sound of God ready to speak to me. It took so long I thought it might
never happen. I slept near the water and God was in the morning air.
I do not love F.P. I drew a heart around our initials in my diary once,
so long ago, but I didn't mean it anymore. I sat on a forested dune on
an island at the bottom of the world. Here, I mourned my dead before
they were gone. Next, I saw in a pocked stone the man who raped me.
I went into the forest by a manuka tree. In this rape, we were inside an
invisible black wind. I focused on the forest until he disappeared. In the
morning, the air through the car window blew into my forehead and
told me what to do. I left the carcass of this rape by a pine tree, who told
another pine tree, etc. By the river where I live there is a pine tree and a
willow tree together. They directed me about the afterlife. My parents
were dead. I drove past the pine tree and the willow tree and came
through the sensation of eternity that had taken hold of me, and the
knowledge that the end of my life might never end. One day, there was
a man, another man, and another man. They are my sons. Their father
came out of the ocean and I said to him, "I love them with wild love."