The comment that follows is one that I posted concerning a photograph of newlyweds my daughter placed on her blog. The middle one of three daughters, she is the one that lives, loves, laughs, labors and lingers with her husband in Northern Virginia (my favorite daughter and my favorite son-in-law, but don’t tell the others). Click here to see her original post entitled, After the rain . . .
Before making the comment I e-mailed her for permission to use the photograph and to provide an advance reading of the comment. This is the comment as I posted it:
I have labored long and strong to produce this comment. Brilliant poetry does not come easy for semi-literate persons—it takes a lot of erasing and changing, and I’m submitting it for your consideration. Depending on your decision—to keep or delete—that is the question.
I will either post it verbatim or I will return it to the bowels of my brain and save it for some other use, but mark my words: It will be published, somewhere for some reason, without photos, of course. I may submit it for competition in the search for the world’s best poem.
A beautiful bubbly bride in a gorgeous gown, a handsome, albeit hairless, groom with the Garden of Eden beckoning in the background—one cannot resist speculating on whether at the end of the ceremony the couple will go hence, as did Adam and Eve, into the Garden—into the bushes, so to speak—and if such be the case that gown, already precariously balanced and threatening to succumb to the effects of gravity, will quickly be weighted down with beggar lice and cockle burrs, and that weight added to the pull of the earth’s center and the predictable possibility of the groom stepping on the gown’s train, accidentally of course, will produce predictable results, and from that spurious speculation springs a poetical predilection:
An ode to newlyweds
Hark! What is that I see?
Is that an apple on yon tree?
And does a serpent nearby lurk,
Upon its lips an evil smirk?
And will that tale of Bible lore,
As in the long gone days of yore,
Perhaps repeat itself once more?
Hark! Not from that apple on the tree,
Nor from the serpent hanging ‘round,
Did life began for thee and me,
‘Twas from that pear on the ground.
Anonymous? Not really. I’m guilty. I wrote it. All by myself.
The poem includes one homonym—betcha can’t find it!
Just a tiny hint: It’s one of a pair of words that sound alike, but are spelled differently and have different meanings—note the word pair in this sentence and the word pear in the poem.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
The King of Texas 