Thursday, March 6, 2008

Restorative Love (Poem with Comments)

Numbers of Asian women when you tell them they are beautiful or lovely (besides thanking you for saying so) practice giving face. It is confusing at first, for when you compliment them, especially when you first know them, they will often strongly deny the compliment...saying it isn't true, or you are joking.

to a Westerner this makes them appear to be of low self esteem, but it actually may be something quite different, a polite manifestation of the social "rules" of their culture so as to not be impolite.

after one such occasion, I wrote this:

Restorative Love
by Tim Kavi

pestilence
famine
years
moments
hours
the locust
has eaten

insistence
vanished
love
tears
all the
time
has beaten

then
you came
on the scene
when
in a few
words
like a dream

your love
restored
all the time
the locust
had eaten

brought hope
dried tears
quieted
a beating
heart

fed
the hungry
found
the lost
gave hope
to my
hopelessness

removed
my own
chains
I had
constructed

and loved
me
until all
was well
again

your
restorative
love
brought
and truthed
and
soothed
all my doubts

with the surety
of your love

and you say
you are not so great?

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