Is love an absolute?
Is it the spark
From the start
That ignites a world
Of passion and obsession?
Or when extinguished,
Does it expel its warmth
Leaving cold and becalmed
A majestic engine
Now refuge for birds and mice,
Rusting on its rails?
Is love an absolute?
Does it thunder a while
Raging over vast fields of corn
Here now, gone in an hour,
To return in its own good time?
Or is it an ancient mountain
Solid, fixed, immobile?
A splendour once great
Its careworn lines
Signalling a past of wonder
And a future of decline?
Is love an absolute?
Does it sprout from seed
To great oak tree
Blossoming outwardly
To all near its gentle boughs?
Or, once it has found
Its bloom, does it conspire
Actively in an inside rot,
A grey husk completing its work
That fixed subway stare
Of pointless indifference?
Oh love, you guide
My life and my thoughts
But your silence
Wrenches my heart apart.
November, 2006
