God is Love, my mother told me—
It is true, the bible says it.
She would read it and kiss me on my forehead,
then I'd ask how beautiful the face of God is.
She said: radiant, child, like morning.
I believed her. I believed in light that needed no shadow.
But I grew, as all children do,
and the world taught me its own scripture.
Love grew teeth—I watched it devour and call it devotion,
saw lovers cling to wreckage like gospel.
If God is Love, then God must also break.
Does the divine fracture like us, split open like pomegranate?
Then my body woke.
Desire moved through me like a second birth—
Eros, the ancient one, the hungering one.
Love was no longer my mother's kiss
but the burning in another's gaze,
the ache of skin that yearns for skin.
The sacred made profane,
or the profane made sacred—
I could no longer tell the difference.
I wondered: if God is Love, and love is this—
this trembling, this thirst, this animal prayer—
then is God also body? Is God also appetite?
Does the divine know pleasure,
the sharp gasp of it, the way we dissolve into each other
trying to solve the loneliness
that God, perhaps, also feels?
Love is the box we should have left closed
but opened anyway, because we would rather burn.
So yes, mother—God is Love.
But Love is not what you told me.
If God is Love, then God, too, made that choice:
to descend, to incarnate, to risk, to be breakable.
That is the face of God—not radiant like morning,
but radiant like fire: beautiful, dangerous, and absolutely necessary.
