Echo of me and you

A poem on love's immortality in a mortal world

“echoes of love" PC: Reena Kapoor (c)2023. Instagram @1stardusty.

Echo of me and you

This river we flow with so

different than the story we

spin or dare reveal

Gorge of dissonance

carves a definition

Only death in its surety,

its maddening, comforting

certainty, won't bother with gaps

What we have to say, say today,

or now, or later tomorrow

if it ever arrives, to those we

want to touch. Some, many 

gushed away, wet envelopes

returned. Such is the force of flow  

Bargains struck, reasons found,

exchanges made without signature

The stars will come for our dust 

merciful, merciless garbage collection

Our bodies won’t answer, rivers

looking to ascend the skies

The idea of me - and you - 

will leave behind echoes in valleys

smoothed pebbles in this riverbed,

lost in its rushing din, but forever

So spins this cycle every day…

Where will we be found today?

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-Reena | Feb 2021-Sept 2023

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These words took me two years — as I walked a passage of grief and loss — to say something about love’s place in eternity. Despite our mortality, does our love live on? I want to say, yes of course! But how? In which valleys does it echo? Which rivers carry it forever? Which oceans does it dissolve into to lend an eternal sweetness to life’s salt?

Everyone says, life is short. Very few live with that knowledge front and center.

Tell those you love what they mean to you today. It’s the oldest, most clichèd, most authentic of life’s guideposts.

And the only antidote to a finite life.