Speaking in Part
(2025)

“Love doth never fall away.” – 1 Corinthians 13:8 (Geneva Bible, 1599)

It may happen that something happens;

wind blow—storm break—thunder fall

—the grim hour come to at last: and the 

love-fashioned house, foundering on a rock,

marvelously in shambles. It may happen

that love too (without fail) will fail:

broken sail, boat gleaned to a raft, begging

the urgent craft that ardent sorrow 

brings; fails as it goes battered and battling 

wind and whirl, woe and whorl—

its final compassion the will to go on. 

And yet, to have been here, to have heard

music that imminent mourning makes, 

to have borne the dividend while time lags, 

the bitter slags of its rupture piling 

against the day; to have been here—

by what fertile, all-pervading, serenely severe mercy?