Gateway to love, John Lyons (40 x 40 cm, oil on canvas)

Sometimes the best poetry
       for the moment is composed
of silence : just as sparrows
       do not sing all day long
a pause a respite a lull
       is always welcome
rather than
       a glut or an excess

Broad margins
       of white space
a huge empty sky
       blue by all accounts
waves of transparent air
       shifting imperceptibly
a kind of nothingness
       of fulfilment

What I want to tell you
       is. . .
but it can wait
       just allow me to be
the one beside you
       basking in your beauty
loving you wordlessly without
       so much as a sigh

John Lyons