The Love I’ve Missed — a poem

I forgot there was love here

and there

I was rummaging through people, places, and things

when my own heart kept calling out my name

Crying out, searching high and low

when all along it was in the way this pen

glides across the page

Leaving a beautiful piece of my love

on a piece of love the trees left for me today

I lost the love in the way

I cry in the day

because the words of the wind are just out of reach

to those who speak before they think what to say

I’ve forgotten the love in looking a stranger in the eyes,

watching the moon begin to rise,

in the way children feel the need to lie

I feel love in the same place that I feel pain

When did I forget that it was all the same?

In the days I have lost running away from the world,

I will go back to find all the pieces of love I lost as a little girl

I will skip them across time and space

in the same way I watch my lover skip rocks across the lake

I will live each moment of each passing day

as though it is my sole purpose to live in this way

I will close my eyes in the dead of the night

and thank the stars for traveling to touch my face from galaxies away,

even though they reside as well—right here—in my heart’s dark cave

For it is out of their love that they travel all this way

just to let me know that forgetting sometimes is okay

Before I got here I know that I prayed

I prayed to the moon, asking her to whisk me away

to a place I could travel to the depths of the soul to find out,

what is pain?

And then fly up to the sky and find what it’s like to be afraid

Then come back to the earth to find a feeling so exhilarating that I couldn’t look away

And that’s when the moon sent me here

to this very place

So now I look back to the moon, and again I pray

Help me to never forget to find love in this place

Ruby asking the moon to send her to experience her beautiful life on Earth.