dance (look at your eyes)

for vicky & gareth

We are so small we can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside us?
Look at your eyes. They are small, but they see enormous things.

Loving actions are the seed of something,
A living-place.

Love means to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that ways heals their heart.
A bird and a tree say to them: Friend.

Look as long as you can at someone you love
No matter whether they are moving away from you
Or coming back towards you.

Some nights stay up till dawn,
As the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
Of a well, then lifted out into light.

I want this music and this dawn
And the warmth of your cheek against mine.

Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance when the bandages come off. Dance in the middle of fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.

But no words will ever mean as much as a life.
So let the words stop now.
Open the window in the centre of your chest,
And let the spirits fly in and out.














Text read at the wedding of Vicky Major & Gareth Wolf, Saturday 4 July 2009, Harbertonford, Devon. Poem adapted from Rumi and Czeslaw Milosz