Belated Valentine

Picture by Plokta Cabal

Jo and Emmet, July 28th 2001

It’s not that you can never drive me mad
with irritation at the things you do —
but always underneath my heart is glad,
those maddening things are part of loving you.
Love isn’t instant, eyes across a room
as strangers recognise a magic true —
love’s made like bread or weaving on a loom
grown slowly out of mulch, both old and new
.Love is a conversation that runs on
a dense-webbed reference set, a glue
of things exchanged, remembered, contexted
that makes us an ethnicity of two.
(Pierrot, bedroom slippers, and that time
I got up from the bed to make a rhyme.)
(For Emmet O’Brien) 17th February 2010