So If You Love Me

Richard Adams

So If You Love Me

So if you love me you will tolerant
Be of the nature that is with me sent.
I cannot be a different thing although
For your sake, to win you, I would grow
Wings and shed thorns,
Be weed, or newly born,
Anything so to please you,
But I'm myself and cannot ease you.

Come kindly to me then, forgiveness use,
Do not heap on my patent-wrongs abuse,
For your sake I'd be different but am not,
For your sake I'd have other needs forgot,
But I am one
And they are of the sum
Of me, and will not set me free
From my desires, which still follow me.

Oh choose, and choose me wholly, so we be
All of imperfectness, but summary.
Be sum, no fraction, though a fraction may
Marvelous wonder easily convey,
Yet it's but part
And may not be the heart,
The whole is all of us, if we use not
All strata, love's geology's forgot. 

Ruth Herschberger


"All strata" - that last bit sticks out to me. So, is that the layers like you might see in canyon walls? I can picture a relationship like that, day after day, layer on layer, rough, smooth, porous, clayey. We have this idea that love should look smooth and put-together, but I've never experienced that. Mandy Len Catron talks about how the language we use to describe love is misleading - "falling in love" (as if it were involuntary, or a trap), "smitten" (past tense for smite), etc. Is love really like that? We need a new rhetoric, new metaphors. After long thought, she came up with the idea of love as a collaborative work of art. I certainly like that better than being hit, falling down or going mad.