Mike Stone's poem sets two ideas of love against each other. The first is the cosy kind: a hearth fire, a cast iron soup pot, something you can leave alone until it bubbles. The speaker rejects that picture straight away. Love, he says, is "wild and dangerous," and the poem spends the rest of its lines showing what he means.
The image he chooses is a predator. Love stalks "in hungry silence," eats "the beating heart," spreads "monstrous wings," and swoops with talons out. The short, clipped lines feel like a held breath, and the moonlit setting adds a hushed, eerie tension. Then the picture turns. Love is also "naked" and "cornered," and it "dies while living," so it is both hunter and victim, powerful and exposed.
The mood is tense, thrilling and a little frightening. The speaker seems to see love as something that costs us everything, and the blunt closing line, "Love is," leaves it standing there without comfort or explanation.