Dear Friends,

 We hope that you are safe and well.

 May is Asian and Pacific Heritage Month celebrating the contributions of Asian And Pacific Islanders to our culture and our lives. Today's Meditation is a poem by Craig Santos Perez, an indigenous Pacific Islander poet, "Love in a time of Covid 19." The poet says it was inspired by Pablo Neruda's "Love Sonnet XVII." We also salute those who are celebrating Cinco de Mayo!

We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in the church, in healthcare, in the workplace--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.

In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that it is God's economy of abundance: when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.

We hope and pray that you find peace, healing, hope and the infusion of joy in your life!

With our love and care,

Ron and Jean

MEDITATION 663: Craig Santos Perez: "Love in a Time of Covid-19" and Pablo Neruda "Love Sonnet XVII"

Love in a Time of Covid-19

Craig Santos Perez

a variant of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVII

I don’t love you as if you were penicillin,

insulin, or chemotherapy drugs that treat cancer,

I love you as one loves the sickest patient:

terminally, between the diagnosis and the death.

I love you as one loves new vaccines frozen

within the lab, poised to stimulate our antibodies,

and thanks to your love, the immunity that protects

me from disease will respond strongly in my cells.

I love you without knowing how or when this pandemic

will end. I love you carefully, with double masking.

I love you like this because we can’t quarantine

forever in the shelter of social distancing,

so close that your viral load is mine,

so close that your curve rises with my cough.

Copyright © 2022 by Craig Santos Perez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 4, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

“This poem is a variant of Pablo Neruda’s famous love sonnet XVII, in which he uses the natural world as a metaphor to describe love. In my poem, this metaphor mutates into things that we would associate with the pandemic, such as medicine, vaccines, and masks, in order to explore how to write about love in a time of Covid-19.”

—Craig Santos Perez

Craig Santos Perez is an Indigenous Pacific Islander poet and the author of Habitat Threshold (Omnidawn, 2020), among other titles. The recipient of prizes and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, the Before Columbus Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation, he is a professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

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Love Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, or topaz

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

So I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.