I love you with every breath.
I inhale and you fill me with fire;
I exhale and am emptied of pain.
I love you when I look up through the sky,
I love you when I look down toward the earth.
I am more in love with you each day.

I cannot speak, I can barely breathe;
My body aches thinking of you,
My heart swells, nearly bursting.

My mind loses its way and tumbles onto uncharted paths.
My thoughts are jumbled and confused.
I am lost and don’t want to be found.
I am empty and don’t want to be filled.
Unless you find me, unless you fill me.
Take my hand and lead me wherever.

Let my eyes go blind staring at you and I will not complain.
Let me taste your mouth and happily starve of all else.
Let me die in your arms and I will bravely regret dying.

I love you.
I wish to stop saying so.
So trite.
So vacuous.
So parrotlike and boyish.
I love you.
I don’t understand.
I don’t care that I don’t understand.
I love you.

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We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an online journal for those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, politics, political economy, literature, the arts, and the American Republic in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Wilhelm Roepke, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, M.E. Bradford, Eric Voegelin, Christopher Dawson, Paul Elmer More, and other leaders of Imaginative Conservatism. Some conservatives may look at the state of Western culture and the American Republic and see a huge dark cloud which seems ready to unleash a storm that may well wash away what we most treasure of our inherited ways. Others focus on the silver lining which may be found in the next generation of traditional conservatives who have been inspired by Dr. Kirk and his like. We hope that The Imaginative Conservative answers T.S. Eliot’s call to “redeem the time, redeem the dream.” The Imaginative Conservative offers to our families, our communities, and the Republic, a conservatism of hope, grace, charity, gratitude, and prayer.

Editor’s Note: The featured image is “La Visione di Sant’Elena (The Dream of Saint Helena)” (c. 1570) by Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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