Peter Meinke is a contemporary author who has penned fourteen books of poems and short stories, and received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Flannery O'Connor Award, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic. Meinke directed the Eckerd College Writing Workshop for 27 years.
The First Marriage
for Gretchen and Herb: June 15, 1991
imagine the very first marriage a girl
and boy trembling with some inchoate
need for ceremony a desire for witness:
inventing formality like a wheel or a hoe
in a lost language in a clearing too far from here
a prophet or a prophetess intoned to the lovers
who knelt with their hearts cresting
like the unnamed ocean thinking This is true
thinking they will never be alone again
though planets slip their tracks and fish
desert the sea repeating those magic sounds
meaning I do on this stone below
this tree before these friends yes in body
and word my darkdream my sunsong yes I do I do
|
);)
);)
);)
);)
);)