Earthbound Hymn to Gravity

All things love each other
And all things love themselves
As well, although that love,

Universal in scope,
Uniformly applied,
Still ends unequally

Distributed in space,
So that somehow all things
Clump up or pull apart

And attraction in fact
Is completely crushing
Or trivially weak,

All of which you could say
More or less truthfully,
Any way of saying

Being mired in language,
No more than embodied
Metaphors, all we have.

Gravity, we say, pulls,
Attracts, gathers, and grabs.
We might as well say loves,

And like the sorts of love
Our bodies know, our tongues
Pronounce, remains at odds

With itself and other
Forces, unfortunate
And asymmetrical,

Creative and hurtful,
Often negligible,
Often overwhelming,

And all this we feel while 
Stuck fast to the surface
Of the earth that loves us

More than the moon loves us,
More than we love ourselves,
But less than dark loves stars.