Covenant Work — Louie Rivers

I don’t want you
the way weather crosses a field
and leaves no memory in the grass.
Not as relief. Not as use.
Not something carried in and set down again.
I want the keeping of you—
not hands that reach and retreat,
but hands that learn weight and do not forget it.
Like fence posts in red clay
leaning into years
as if the ground itself insists on them staying.
Not fire that proves itself by disappearing,
but ember held under ash
until even air learns caution.
I want no exit hidden in the beginning.
Only this:
the ordinary shock of staying—
waking in the same air
without calling it miracle,
learning your silences the way men read low clouds
that have not yet decided what they will become.
I want love that does not announce itself.
Only a table still warm after the meal,
two chairs not pushed back,
bread drying where it was left
as if leaving were never imagined.
To love you like a hymn
the body remembers
after every voice that carried it has gone quiet.

To grow with you
not upward, not away—
but into what holds the ground together.
And to serve with you
not as descent, not as ascent,
but as the shape love takes
when it stops asking to be justified.
Not covenant as idea.
Covenant as weight on a porch step in the dark.
Covenant as weather settled into wood grain
that refuses to leave without learning your name.
And if this is holy,
it will not break the air.
It will arrive the way morning does
in a house where nothing has ended properly—
still here, still holding,
with no announcement that it ever chose to stay.

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Louie Rivers is a Southern poet from Mississippi. His work is shaped by voice, faith, and the physical weight of lived experience in the South. He writes with a focus on clarity, restraint, and emotional honesty, often returning to themes of memory, endurance, and identity. His work has appeared in Eunoia Review and he received 3rd place in the 18th Annual University of Mississippi Writing Competition, “A Celebration Through Tradition.”