What is Love?

What is Love?
Can it make the old young?
Can it make the sick well?
Does it make the weak strong, the fool wise?
Does it redeem the doomed?
Transform water into wine
In the imperfect hour of death
Restore to perfect health?

Can I beg
Borrow, steal, or make?
By hoarding is it lost or saved?
Once given, has my stock decreased
Or is it a currency increased
The more used?
Is it the most valuable commodity
Or free?

Is it freedom?
A key to a prison?
Does it entangle, entwine, ensnare?
Does it make friends of enemies
Or an enemy of a fiend?

Is it like a diamond smashed
That multiplies its faces
Or an arboretum, devoted to trees
That divides and divides, to increase its light?
Like striking at bubbles, does to destroy makes more
Or, is it the very substance of creation
The only true spontaneous thing?

Is it an elixir, when mixed with ink
Causing words writ to live, I think
Blended with paint, an artist may endure
Does Love devour Time
As Time devours all?

Is it more, in its imperfect ore
Than all else in its perfect form?
An essence, a milk, a balm
Measured in kisses and sacrifices?

Is it a medicine? A remedy? A building material?
A magic ingredient in dishes and potions?
Can a drop boil an ocean?

As natural as water
As abundant as air
As encompassing as sunlight
Like the gentle pull of gravity
Always moving something somewhere...

What is Love?
Is She the smallest voice
Or the greatest?
If I talk above Her, shall my words become ash?

Is She the answer to a riddle?
Does She water tears, or dry them?
Doth She lend sorrow its sweetness
Or sweetness its joy?
Does She fruit the harder pruned
Causing all things to bloom
Or does She die, for that outside Herself
And by that token grow?

Will She unite all earth
With all of Heaven above?
Does She always serve another
Is She only ever called, 'Love'?

Or perhaps She is a string
That benefits both ends
Or maybe just life's meaning
This feeling, God sends?