If you cannot weep you cannot love.
Who is a lover if he knows not weeping?
Unless indifference were all removed
both love and tears would be forever sleeping.
If love did not transform with living sap
the dead branch of the flat and shallow greeting,
each one of us would live across a gap
moving in parallels and never meeting.
The reaching out of love is loss and gain.
In winning glad possession, losing pain.
Love must be had with penalty of tears
for each escorts the other closely bound
as lovers find in pendulum of the years.
Each surge of passion sinks towards the ground
and in false death of anger’s surly shout
the tears flow in as shaken love takes leave.
When love is dead then love turned inside out
will show the face of grief, the roughened weave.
When love’s a moment buried or utterly done,
Then weeping proves for sure that love was done.
Source: “Family, My Home” by Amy Gladys McGrath
