dance, clown, or we are led: a marriage song

dance, clown, or we are led

 

we are in a calendar, reclined

on ironweed or coriander and

we’d dine on cordial, éclair

and codeine. I’d declare

a weirder line or dare:

renewal OR decline in

carrion. no care, no narrow

rancor, no recoil. we rained,

an arid, Nordic colander.

 

 

Source

Out of respect, I will just say that a couple named Andrew and Caroline were featured in a way that fits the rules to a t.

 

Note:

This is a cousin of one of the prompts earlier, with the task to write a marriage song composed from the letters of the names of bride and groom. This is a really fun exercise and fit very nicely in the limited amount of free time I had today. My strategy is basically to get a set of words I like a lot and then to play around with them. The restrictions make for a lot of alliteration and internal rhymes which is not the worst thing in the world. There’s perhaps a strand of narrative here. Gravity seems to pull these poems in a somewhat odd direction, such that I felt weird about providing their full names. This is not meant to be a dark poem as much as a poem about dark people.

 

Here is the prompt I was responding to:

An Oulipian epithalamium, or marriage song, is one composed exclusively with the letters of the names of bride and groom (bride and bride, groom and groom, etc). Visit the engagement or wedding announcements section of your newspaper and select a couple. Write a poem using only words that can be made with the letters in their name. You may choose to use first names only if you prefer anonymity or full names if you’re desperate for more letters.