The Next Page February 2013 | Page 44

How can one love me? Let me measure the ways.

Is it in strife or in happiness?

Is it in manifestation or in faith?

Have I ever known the lengths of such love?

Or the depths of one's heart?

Love was never hope or a finding. Love for me was never some hazy cloud

of mystery and beauty. Love was always spared.

What is love? Is it a deep ocean of understandings so unknown to me that

love should come as an epiphany?

Is it a meadow with beds, gardens, even fields of flowers with the essence

of sweet honey and the warmth of sunshine cradling me like a soft blanket?

Has love ever known me? Has he ever met my gaze in a room filled with a

thousand eyes, or in a small passing glance?

Am I condemned, a scorned face they come to confide in for a short

while. Disavowing them selves from me, needing no trace left behind.

How can one love me? As now I write these words that will surely curse me.

I am nothing and no one.

Who will measure my love? Who will know that I am the love that every

poet, scholar and enlightenment seeker as so greatly described? Who?

I meet my own eyes in the mirror and peer into every layer of my soul

and find there is only pain. Hurt that no one will ever dare to try and heal.

I am alone and love will always be but a stranger that I long for in the dark.

Elsie Alvarez

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