"Love is Quick"

Love is quick-crashing meteorites.

We measure with all the wrong tools.

I opened a book; a stream of birds flew out.

Love is that startling, that unusual.

I’ve been trying to transcribe love’s briskness.

I might as well toss words into the air.

I’ve been trying to catch love’s cadence,

note by note into stanzas of music. Forget it.

Decades of bones have piled over the lack of love.

Van Gogh lost an ear over it.

Attila the Hun razed villages because no one told him

he was loved. The Fountain of Youth is love no one found.

The waterwheel of love keeps emptying;

all’s we have to do is taste it.

Martin Willitts Jr is a poetry editor for Comstock Review. He won the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Award, the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, (June) 2015, and the Editor’s Choice, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided work for "Poetry On The Bus" which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bilingual poems from 7 different languages. He is the author of 23 chapbooks and collections of poetry, including The Uncertain Lover (Dos Madres Press, 2018), and Home Coming Celebration (FutureCycle Press, 2019)