This time change has me going to bed at 9pm and waking up at 4am! It’s still pitch dark outside and here I am, wide awake and inspired to write a poem. I love poetry, especially old poetry. There’s something about the way people put their hearts into words that makes me wish we still wrote each other love letters. But I’m a romantic. I can’t help it.
Last night I finished reading White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and I think a little of its melancholy followed me into the morning. It’s beautiful and tragic, and the kind of story that makes you close the book and sit with your feelings for a while. Published in 1848, it makes me wonder what it would have been like to live back then. How different the world must have looked, but here I am, almost two centuries later, moved by the same longing to love and be loved.
Old literature, old movies, antiques… old anything, honestly. I LOVE it. I’m truly an old soul, especially when it comes to romance. I’ll absolutely melt into a pile of mush getting a kiss on my hand or getting a handwritten letter from my love. So, in the quiet of this very early morning, here’s a poem about my favorite subject: love. The kind you look at with new eyes and wonder how you ever failed to see it was there all along.
It Was Always You
My love,
how shall I explain the wonder of it
to look into your eyes,
after all this time,
and feel my heart grow shy
before a face it knows by heart?
I thought I understood
what it meant to love you.
Yet here I am,
lingering over the sound of your voice,
finding reasons to sit a little nearer,
wishing the hour would forget itself
and leave us here.
And all the while, I am thinking,
you.
How can it be
that it has always been you?
There are things the soul knows
long before we have the humility
to believe them.
Mine must have known you.
Even in the years I could not
make sense of my own heart,
some tenderness remained
your name beyond the reach
of all my leaving.
Forgive me.
I have spent so much of my life
believing love must be difficult
to be worthy of devotion.
Now you take my hand
with such untroubled tenderness,
and I scarcely know what to do
with the happiness of it.
I want to tell you everything.
Then I want to sit beside you
without saying a word.
There is such intimacy
in knowing I may do either,
and you will draw me closer.
Sometimes I look at you
and feel an almost sorrowful joy
for all the ordinary days
I wish to have with you,
your coat beside mine,
a book left open,
the evening gathering at the glass.
To grow old within these little things.
To hear you call from another room
and rise, knowing I am wanted there.
I have asked God so many questions.
But when I pray beside you,
gratitude overtakes them.
I think He knew
how dearly I would come to love
the man before me,
how I would one day look at you
and understand my own prayers.
You, my dearest.
The love of my life,
sitting close enough to touch.
Let me have the years
to tell you what that means.
Let my hair silver beneath your hand.
Let me learn your face
as time keeps changing it.
And when I have grown old
and you ask why I am looking at you,
I shall tell you the truth,
I am still a little astonished
that God should have given me
a lifetime to love you.
And that a lifetime,
even now,
seems far too brief.
Because,
my love
it was always You.
💕-KK