First Red Hearth

A poem about love that feels older than language.

There are moments in love that don’t feel modern.

They don’t belong to text messages or shared calendars or even language.
They feel older than that—
like something discovered rather than created.

Like fire.

---

First Red Hearth

Remove the paper from my shoe—
a poem of my heart,
a rolling thunder through the morning’s
blue-gray awakeness.

Come on, bend knee,
crouch to be with me.
Love, in this our secret cave,
past the boulder gate—
it is cavernous.

Hold your lantern up
and see me
in a softer, purer light—
the light of fire,
red upon my frightened face.

Time casts shadows
that cannot reach us.

Rest with me a while
on the stony floor,
my body something soft to cling to.

As time—
for souls can match
through walls,
sheets, and marriages—
moments lying between us.

As fears flicker,
we do not.

But wrapped, skin in skin,
we are tucked in,
dreaming of history—
a harbor filled with tea,
bodies like sugar cubes
melting into the world.

As the world—
we left our clothes
back where the dinosaurs could eat us.

Here we marry
in the first red hearth,
sticks and sorrows curling to ash,
sturdy logs for drifting down rivers
smolder instead,

smoke finding its escape route
while we cry
in each other’s arms
at last.

---

Sometimes I think love is not about becoming better.

Not softer.
Not easier.
Not even safer.

But more ancient.

A return to something before we learned how to perform ourselves—
before we understood fear as something to obey.

A place where we are allowed to be seen in firelight,
not fluorescent light.

Where nothing has to be proven.
Where what is real
doesn’t disappear.

Just this:

two people
choosing, for a moment,
not to turn away.