Most love poems announce their feelings. Dominic Black's "Your Lighthouse" counts them. Its tiny refrain, "Once a friend / Once a spouse," is altered each time it returns, and that slow arithmetic carries the story of a relationship: friendship that becomes marriage, marriage that is lost or tested and then renewed, and a final settling into something that cannot end.
The central image is the lighthouse, which the speaker sees "in the distance." A lighthouse is a odd thing to compare a spouse to, and that is what makes it work. It is fixed and does not travel, so any approach must come from the one at sea. It guides, warns and keeps watch. The distance in the opening line suggests a gap between the two people, though the poem never says what caused it. The beloved is steady while the speaker drifts, and the light is how they stay connected: "You reach for me through your light." The beam becomes an arm, so a mechanical sweep of light turns into a gesture of tenderness. The next line adds a paradox: "I can see your sun in the dark of night." A lighthouse is only a small, man-made sun, yet in the speaker's darkness it is warm and life-giving enough to deserve the bigger word.
The sea imagery shifts in the last stanza, where the speaker sees "Waves of not water but wine." The line catches the reader off guard, and I read it in two ways. Wine suggests intoxication, so the danger of the sea becomes the dizziness of desire, which the next line confirms: "Deeply wanting to make you mine." It also suggests celebration and perhaps something ceremonial, since wine is part of weddings and shared rituals. The poem doesn't push this, but the idea of a sea that nourishes rather than drowns fits the way fear gives way to longing as the poem goes on.
The sound of the poem is simple on purpose. Lines are short, with only a few stresses each, and they move like slow breaths. Rhyme does a lot of the work. "Lighthouse" and "spouse" close the first stanza on a full rhyme, which ties the beloved's image to the idea of marriage. "Light" and "night" form a couplet in the second stanza, and the third gathers a chain of "wine," "mine" and "shine." The rhymes stay in the same few vowel sounds, so the poem sounds like one continuous glow. "Friend" is the exception. It never rhymes with anything, and perhaps that is the point: friendship is the fixed, unadorned starting point that everything else is built on.
The refrain is the cleverest structure in the poem. "Once a friend" stays the same in all three stanzas, while the second line changes: "Once a spouse," then "Twice a spouse," then "Finally / Eternal spouse." "Once" is a slippery word here. It can mean "one time" or "formerly," so the first stanza hints at something past. "Twice" suggests a second chance, a remarriage or a recommitment, though the poem never specifies which. The last version breaks the pattern with a line of its own, "Finally," which has the relief of someone arriving after a long voyage. "Eternal" pushes the relationship beyond ordinary time, and given the dark and the distance, some readers may hear a hint of death or afterlife. That is an interpretation, not something the text confirms.
The stanzas grow as well, from four lines to four to seven. The single-word line "Still" is a hinge. It means "nevertheless," as the speaker keeps seeing the light despite the longing, and it also means "motionless," exactly what a lighthouse is. One small word holds both persistence and stability.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. There are no long explanations of what went wrong or how it was repaired, only a changing number and a steady light. That restraint leaves room for the reader to supply their own story, and it shows how a repeated line can change meaning just by shifting one word. By the end, "spouse" no longer means a legal status. It has become a point of light that the speaker can steer toward.