“The Lovers,” oil on canvas, by Emile Friant, 1888.
Years ago, on an Oprah episode, a young man who was dying of cancer looked at his mother and Oprah and said, “It’s so simple.” In his final months as a living dying human, he got the message that God (or no God) is trying to tell us. It’s about love. It is always and only about love. And every teenage poet and pop singer already knows.
Almost three years ago, I visited my mother several days before she died. She was just lucid enough to know it was me. As I sat studying the coastline of her profile, the weather of her pale blue irises, I realized all I needed to do was tell her how much I loved her. I held her hand, the hands I had known longer than anything on this earth, and spoke of love. It was clear that was the only message she needed. The one we all need.
I visited my grandkids yesterday. The joy they took from the chocolate coins I gave them and the stuffed bunny my three-year-old granddaughter insisted on carrying during our hike and out to lunch. Children are writing their letter to the world with their whole bodies every day of the year. Love is a chocolate coin, a pink bunny. Simple.
We can change so little in this world. We can only hold back the sky as long as the clouds will let us. We enter a beloved’s heart the way a city enters a poem, gradually as raindrops fill a bucket. I’m whispering my letter, so the world will lean in to hear me. I know I’ll sound a little smug like Oprah, but that’s okay. It’s the simplest and most difficult assignment: Love like you are a child, because you are. Love like you are dying, because you are.
Valentina Gnup’s most recent book is Ruined Music, from Grayson Books. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from CSUF and her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her poems have appeared in December, The Brooklyn Review, Nimrod, The New Guard, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award, the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award, the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, the Joy Harjo Poetry Award, the Lascaux Prize in Poetry, and the Mary Belle Campbell Book Award for her chapbook Sparrow Octaves. She lives in Oakland, California where she coaches high school writers.
