As long as you can be called mine

What would you do, my love, if you lost your smile
Or your curly toes?
If your sense of humor left you
And your wit dulled over time?
If you lost the charming way you have of
Laughing at yourself,
And all your pleasant quirks and deep devotions
Dissappeared?
What would be left if accident, or hard years,
Took away what made you lovely,
Even to me who knows you best?

You have said, even when you were angry,
That the times you felt most loved were when you
Made a grave mistake and stood exposed and awkward,
Feeling ugly and ashamed, and
Saw it did not change the way I loved you.

Strip us down of all our pretty charms and faults,
And make us give up talent and manners -
Everything that can be taken away by drout or flood
Or time or circumstance.
Let me lift up my arms so you can pull away my
Way with words and patient heart,
And are we so much more than names -
smooth stones with tiny marks to set us all apart?
At the very heart what it means to be yours is
That I would love you to the grave for the very reason that
You were the stone I chose.

But I say, while you have smiles and toes,
Let me make for you my love songs.
If we are little stones then
Let me spin words large
And lavish. Let me seek, like Chesterton, with frolicsome works
To make the world wide.
I have seen the heart you have inside and know,
More than most, what your fingertips are like.

And for joy I say they are like rosebuds,
And your eyes like stars.
All our ornaments are hyperboles
God gave us when He said "Let there be light".

So let me sing about your smiles and your
Laughing heart - I cannot make a metaphor large enough
To tell of all the joys our Maker made there.
We all are figures shining forth the face of God -
Tiny micro-worlds where woman, man,
Christ, and church all dwell.

And you, my love, have given me the right
To see these Sights
As long as you can be called mine.