Someone must say you can love before you can love.
Love is not the breaking of the law—or the law,
Love is what the law permits.
Whatever lovers allow
Is love. The approval itself, is love.
Love does not approve. Love wants the approval.
No approval is love’s removal.
Someone must say you can love before you can love.
After Valentine’s day, after the money and the flowers,
After dark dinners and clumsy aftermaths, lingered over for hours,
Only then, may the birds’ safety, upon the highest tree,
Give approval to you, and comity to me,
When stripped of our pride, and our gallantry,
We linger by the tamarind tree.
Someone must say the poem out loud before there is poetry.