How Love Turns Into Poetry Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

I never closed the door on any lover,
never felt the need to be exclusive.
Within my circuitry each phantom other
and all they signified remains alive.

Yet for a woman's part, I've come to see,
the door must close - that female consciousness
gives so much more to love, that to be free
demands an end to love's untidyness.

Googling a long-lost love's discography
by chance, I was returned to a world I'd left
- which was her life. This somehow consoled me,
as if what I had gained was not by theft.

Few men see past the screen of white desire
into the complex red of women's needs.
I've only come to understand what they require
by learning to decode my dauters' creeds.

It's as if nature plays us all a trick,
disguising from each the essential information
by which to make a reasonable pick
from mates available for delectation.

We must assume this lottery serves our genes
and that within such broad diversity
there is a higher purpose, which all means
that life is served by promiscuity!

Bu t none of this resolves the riddle: how
men and women find the magic spark
that lights the long procession of their vows
throu years of joy … & long nights in the dark.

And yet this ancient miracle occurs
afresh a million times a minute; quite how
I've no idea, tho for 30 years
the spark's remained alight in my life. Somehow.

There are three words continually abused:
yet which like jewels perennially glisten
tho they are old as time: the first is new,
the second love, the third for those that listen

God. Each masks a deeper archetype
mere words can never capture, each a spring-fed
well, which well withstands both heat & hype
& shows at heart we're far from media-led.

And the title? I'm curious how little ash
is left of a once-great tree burned in the fire;
curious too that after the lightning flash
of love has riven the darkness and expired,

and even the ensuing progeny no more
than distant memory, yet poetry stands
monument to those we once adored,
secure beyond emotion's shifting sands.

Thus I quietly praise the one with whom
I've walked so long that love like spring seems normal,
and honour with this verse each new-found bloom
whose power has come to underpin & form all.


1/11/06