Love's Pain

It seems we turn to skin in search of love,
the body still triumphant:
the taste of sex,
the smell,
the strangled cries we send
like prayers of joy.

Thus does our flesh cry out. But why to God?
Which drives us back to birth
and mothers’ pains
that etch the cost of love on unborn brains.

The bloody birth that makes us,
leaves us flat and gasping like
landed trout,
but then cry out.

And “Where is God?” we ask,
while living lives
we’ve cluttered with complaints,
shout hate, and, worse, make war.

A grizzly waits to catch us when we spawn,
a hungry God
so very glad to eat us as we die.
And to such grizzly thoughts, I say “Amen.”