Love and Resurrection
by The Midnight Psalmist
Love and Resurrection
I. The best kind of love
arrives like weather you can’t outrun.
It’s got melancholy stitched into the lining.
A low church organ playing somewhere far off,
even on a clear day.
It’s longing.
Longing for the sound of her breath
on the other side of a closed door.
Longing for a future that hasn’t been written yet —
but God help me, I’ve already memorized the rooms in it.
You want it with a hunger that doesn’t shout.
It just sits in your chest.
And waits.
It’s fear.
The cold kind.
The kind that tells you:
If you speak, you’ll break it.
If you stay quiet, you’ll break yourself.
Fear that love this big is borrowed.
And someone’s coming in the night to collect.
And it’s wanting.
A wanting that kneels.
Wanting her laugh like a hymn.
Wanting her hand like a promise.
Wanting to be the man who shows up anyway —
shaking hands, wrecked heart, dirty boots —
and still says: I’m here.
The best kind of love doesn’t lie.
It says: everything beautiful is breakable.
It says: carry this stone.
It hurts.
And you carry it.
Because it’s holy.
So when the moment comes
you say it plain.
No thunder.
No angels.
Just the truth.
Offered like a cup of water in a dry room.
And whatever comes after —
mercy or ruin —
you take it.
II. The sea rose up like scripture that day.
Vast. Unforgiving.
Each wave a verse I could not unhear.
I walked the shoreline.
Water licking my ankles clean of sin.
Sun hanging above like a golden witness —
terrible and kind.
She was in my head.
The new one.
The one Heaven wrenched from my bones
and named without asking me.
Her name — a stone in my throat.
Heavy with all the hymns I never learned.
Gulls screaming like prophets.
Waves breaking like Revelation.
And I thought:
This is how mercy arrives.
Not with trumpets.
With light on water.
With the awful knowledge
that I would walk into fire for her.
That I would kneel in the tide
if she asked.
A beautiful day is dangerous.
It makes you believe in resurrection.
It makes you want to be better than the dust you came from.
The beach was Eden before the fall.
And I was Adam again.
Newborn. Stupid with love.
Counting grains of sand like a man counts days till judgment.
Her eyes.
Brown as earth after rain.
Deep as a grave I’d gladly dig myself.
The wind said her name.
And I answered: Amen.
I walked till the sun bled into the water.
And I thought:
If this is blasphemy — damn me.
Crucify me on a beautiful day
with her name on my lips.
III. I keep a throne
in the desert of my ribs.
And it is made of wanting you.
Terrible throne.
Green wood that won’t burn.
Nails made of the psalms
I learned as a child
and have tried to forget.
I sit on it every night.
Bleed a little.
That’s what kings do in the books of the prophets.
You stand at the door.
Hands full of bread.
And my name.
You say it like a benediction.
Like you could say it forever.
And still — I’m afraid.
The way Adam was afraid
when he heard the Lord walking in the garden.
Afraid because I am naked.
Because I ate from the tree of knowing you.
To love you is to build an altar out of my own bones
and set it on fire.
To lie in the furnace with Shadrach
and pray the fourth man looks like you.
To walk to the sea and believe it will part,
even though my own doubt is Pharaoh’s army,
chariots thundering behind me.
I watch you sleep.
Your breath — Spirit over the deep.
Your hand — a country I want citizenship in.
But citizenship costs.
It costs the old passport.
It costs walking out of Egypt
with nothing but a promise
and a pillar of fire that might just be
your eyes in the dark.
The pain is this:
You love me back.
You didn’t run when you saw the throne.
When you saw the blood.
You knelt.
You touched the green wood.
You said: This is where I want to sit, too.
And suddenly — the desert blooms.
Suddenly — the nails turn to lilies in your hands.
So take it.
All of it.
The fear. The furnace. The flood.
The knife I sleep with.
The hymn I choke on.
Because the scripture scratched into my chest says:
perfect love casts out fear.
And you, with your bread
and your benediction
you look a lot like perfect.
The dark is still here.
It always will be.
But now
it has your shape in it.
And that, beloved —
that is resurrection.
The Midnight Psalmist (2026)
