Gravity and Milkweed

by K. Olsen

What Is Love Poetry Contest Winner

There is a gravity holding all things in their course,
as inexorable as the moon’s pull on the tide,
as irresistible as the sun’s warmth on fragile leaves—
I feel it in my chest every time you leave me,
drawing me along in your wake,
a fish hooked on spinner by an absent angler.

Love is not brought into being in an instant:
instead, it grows like milkweed up through cracks
in the stony shell around my heart,
giving sustenance to butterfly longings.

I did not know it bloomed as year followed year,
even as we spoke of growth and gardening.
Now I do not know how to hold the sea of emerald
and delicate pink that has supplanted my shell,
for it seems the best I can do is press lips to petals,
and hope someday the roots which bind find home.

Love is not brought into being by choice,
but it turns me to follow your voice’s echoes—
as waves surge to shore urged by celestial silver,
as sunflowers track Helios’s chariot in the sky.

And though you know the change you made in me,
you do not hear what is etched on my soul
when I mouth the words, “I love you.”

Yet here I remain with you as a friend,
and I would not trade that time for the world itself.

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