The last one

This is the last poem of a group of poems that I wrote several years ago, and submitted for publication then and more recently.

The source of love is the lover

It was with you

I began to understand

the power of the source and the catalyst;

the necessity of the impulse to support the action

and of the action to realise the intention.

To say I love, I must love.

How late I come to this,

and surely there’s more.

The endeavour is perilous;

we reach for the heart only to recoil

when our fingers encounter skin.

Or we are halted just by a look,

dismayed when a shaft of light

jolts the beloved into negative relief.

But I saw it played out before me,

in a man’s face contorted with pain

and the effort of expression:

there is no guilt involved.

We give of ourselves to make it true, to make it love;

we relinquish nothing.

It is the holding back,

the holding on,

that causes loss.

And the loss is always our own.

(First published in New Contrast 165 Vol 42, No 1)