Sacred Profanity

I wrote this poem as a companion to a previous poem called Before the Flood, which I published on this blog in October. Both pieces are about that obsessive, imprudent, delicious love that we so readily embrace with boundless faith so many times in our youth. Lately I've been thinking about how easily and entirely one falls in love at sixteen or seventeen - and how often. At times I wish it were as easy now as it was back then to recklessly love, without armor or logic or cunning or calculation.

Sacred Profanity

I loved him

With the sort of sacrilegious fervor

That enrages the most indifferent of deities.

I knew that divinity resides even in the wretched

And we would erect a heavenly realm

To rival celestial kingdoms real and mythical

Or perish readily of our heretical delusion.