Isaiah 53 contra 1 Corinthians 13
Love is painful,
love is blind.
It births envy
and boasts of its object,
it is rapacious as the grave.
Love is easily angered,
ready to stab and slash at all threats.
Love dismembers, love's despised.
Love is obsessive,
it always protects,
hopelessly trusts,
ceaselessly hopes.
Love never fails,
it's stronger than death.
Love is ugly.
Love is exposed.
Love is embarassing.
Love is vulnerable.
Love is doomed.
Love overcomes all,
consumes all,
takes all.
Love is sharp.
It may seem weird to post my half of a conversation, but a friend asked for some clarification, and this is what I responded...
ReplyDelete"Hmmm... Weeeeeell, now we come to the difficulty of "interacting with poetry"...
I can't really clarify the message for you, because your experience of reading it is going to be totally different from my experience both of writing it, and of reading it later. My state of mind when I composed it, followed by my state of mind when I posted it, are already different from now...
It could definitely end, "love is just", but for me, in the moment, it was more a meditation on the pain and terror of love, particularly of the love of a mother for her child... That's where the ideas of blindness, anger and envy came in, and also the ceaseless hope and optimism... But it was also that mother love/parent love that drove the Godhead to that decision, and that follow through. God's love dismembered Jesus. Jesus' love dismembered Jesus. We despised it...
It was all those thoughts that led me to expand that "love is sharp", it wasn't necessarily a conclusion...
See, I told you I couldn't clarify anything!
And please, do comment publicly! Pretty much no one ever does! But it's always interesting!
:-)