When Intimacy Dies, Love Decays Poem by Richard Stopps

When Intimacy Dies,
Love Decays
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When touch withdraws and leaves the body bare,
Not naked flesh, but starved of gentle claim,
Two souls grow hushed within a shared despair,
And speak in vows, yet never breathe a flame.

No single wound brings such a union low,
But daily frost where warmth once freely moved;
A thousand moments where we cease to know
The quiet ways in which we once were proved.

Yet still I stand, not mourning what is lost,
But aching for the ember yet unseen -
That through the winter's long and numbing cost,
Some tender shoot might rise from what has been.

Reach once again -
let longing be our art:
For Love must live in touch,
or cease within the heart