Making Love, Ancient and Modern

The comically named Microbrachius dicki
Is the origin of mankind’s copulation.
One evolutionary spurt would form genitalia –
Leading to love poems and sexual elation.

Three hundred and eighty five million years ago
A placoderm, a primitive fish
Stopped reproducing by spawning and mated by having sex:
Penetrating and being penetrated becomes its fervent wish.

One grows an L-shaped appendage complete with body claspers
With which to grip and enter another’s genital plates,
Both fish lock together like Velcro: appendages dock with entrances,
Sperm’s transferred and for that moment they’re best mates.

Jump forward three hundred and eighty five million years
And the same organs that Blake said were Beauty
Are penetrating and being penetrated and sticks of stiff flesh
Are rubbed together to make fire and their owners fruity.

When pairs of lovers exchange old-fashioned looks
A fertility rite’s in the air:
Mayday blooms and maypoles flower in their eyes
As the couples dance up the stairs.

Clothing’s removed; it lies in mounds like shed snakeskin
In anticipation of a new lease of life.
They whisper a password – quivering and craving admission
To a new world for which the password is ‘love’.

“I lost my bed, can I sleep in yours?” they laugh
At the strange feeling of being possessed.
They were separate selves now coming together
To be blessed with a feeling that’s limitless.

In a post-coital reverie they sometimes see
Life in a new light; see visionary solutions…
Sex is magic, like time-travel only time stops
To allow lovers to glimpse their evolution.

Heathcote Williams