[Honestly, with riveting titles like these, I don’t understand why I’m not getting a gazillion hits a day …]

Today’s device is

Epithalamion:  A poem for marriage, or for a wedding celebration.

from The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices, by William Packard.

The name sounds like a layer of skin.  I’ll just let that one go, like a high hanging curveball.  Swing away.

This next poem is one of my favorites because it is one of those poems that wrote itself.  I literally pulled off the side of the road, grabbed some trash off the floor board of my car (don’t judge) and wrote it down as it came out.  The sight of a tree was the prompt.  The poem was originally published in Main Street Rag Literary Magazine, Winter (2000) issue.  Thanks for reading!

The Marriage Tree
(by Suzanne Baldwin Leitner)

He bought it for her when they moved
into their house, out of rented rooms,
silver maple whose name
matched her white gold band
still a newlywed as he dug the deep
oval hole for root ball. The stripling
promised much: quiet, timid strength, rest,
long life, branches for nesting,
shelter, shade. It grew slowly,
was never hit by lightning, lost
none of its branches to wind or storm
so it must be embarrassed this October
with each leaf in its top half vivid
orange and all leaves in its bottom half olive
green not even compromising
toward yellow, two different seasons happening
at once, so the wind blows its branches not
in a sway but against each other.