after Jürgen Moltmann
“God suffers in us, where love suffers,”
writes the theologian of the cross,
the fate awaiting all God’s lovers.
You are my beloved, says the Father
as his dove rips through clouds to bless
the Son with suffering. In us, where love suffers,
Christ’s ache throbs closer than a brother’s—
stabbing my breasts, my thighs, his loneliness,
the fate awaiting all God’s lovers.
God takes on flesh and thinks he’ll smother.
Reeling, obsessed, his heart a wilderness,
God’s a mess, suffering in me as I suffer
over a torn leaf, a tore-up man, the others
I’ve tried to love, shorn to the bone and luckless
as the Son. What fate’s awaiting all the lovers
who dwell in me as migraines, as a stutter
in the veins, whose loss grows in me like grass?
God suffers them gladly. In us, love suffers:
it’s the grace awaiting all God’s lovers.