Language

I speak my love in a language you’ve never been taught,

In dialects woven from silence and thought.

You listen for trumpets, 

for bells in the air

But my voice is a snowfall,

it lands without flare.

I say I adore you in gestures so small

In mending the cracks in the frame of your wall.

In watching the weather that gathers your rain,

In learning by heart every tremor of pain.

But you search for a lighthouse blazing the sea,

While I light quiet candles no one else can see.

You ask for bright fireworks spelling your name,

While I press wildflowers and call it the same.

I write you devotion in languages strange

In constellations I carefully arrange.

In the tea that I warm like a midsummer sun,

In the coat that I bring when the cold winds run.

Yet the words that I speak are lost in the air,

Like birds made of ink no one else is aware.

You hear only silence where poems reside,

Whole forests of love standing just out of sight.

And I ache like a river that can’t cross the land,

With oceans of feeling you can’t understand.

Because I say I love you a thousand soft ways

But none sound like love in the tongue that you praise.