TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Love poems are maybe the hardest poems to write. I speak only for myself here, but I have a feeling plenty of poets agree with me.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s challenging to write any poem, and there are lots of different kinds of love poems. You can write a love poem to your child, to your pet, to your sister. You can write a love poem that remembers someone you lost — I mean, isn’t an elegy a kind of love poem? I think so. Grief is love. Any time we’re memorializing someone or something, we’re doing so out of love and respect.

You can even write a love poem to an object, a season, a concept. Odes — poems that praise or celebrate someone or something — have been popular since ancient times, and isn’t a praise poem a kind of love poem, too? I say yes. I’ve written love poems about the world, the landscape, my children, my parents, my grandparents. I’ve written love poems about Ohio, about home. I’ve even written love poems to trees!

But then, there’s the love poem we’re all thinking about: the poem designed to woo, or to declare the speaker’s devotion to the object of their affection. Writing about romantic love is flat out hard.

Which is why, if you look through my books, you probably won’t find anything that looks or sounds like a traditional love poem. I think it’s easier to write about the exciting or painful longing for love, and the bitter or confusing aftermath of a relationship, than it is to write about having love — being in it.

It’s a trade-off, I suppose, to be content in life but a little discontent with a pen in my hand, trying to commit it to the page. Another way of saying this is that I write best when I’m grappling. When I’m happy, I’m just … happy. I’m inarticulate in love. And that’s great for my life, just not great for my poems!

I can live with that. Life hands us enough strife; we don’t need to wish for more material.

Today’s poem wooed me with its title, but it won me over completely with the last couplet. I’m not playing hard to get with this poem. I’m all in.

At the Entrance of a Love Poem, I Hesitate
by Maya C. Popa

Haven’t I been here before,
and didn’t I leave through the window?

In love, then the remainder
of a life that love had made.

So gradual the change, a whale turning slowly,
mistaken for a continent by gulls.

Affection sufficed when vision ran dry,
the answer dissolving the exquisite inquiry.

What is  a love poem? I’d make this one,
if only convention could keep up

with a heart’s multiplying gravities.
All my loves blink back, a gallery of mirrors.

Look how we’ve made 
of each other’s likeness a life.

“At the Entrance of a Love Poem I Hesitate” by Maya C. Popa from IF YOU LOVE THAT LADY © 2026 Maya C. Popa. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Co and the poet.