For Random Learning Comes: Essays Fiction and Poetry by Andrea LeDew

For Random Learning Comes

For Random Learning Comes: Essays Fiction and Poetry by Andrea LeDew

Black-and-white and sepia photos in an inbox made of wire, showing a family morphing and growing over time. PHOTO PROMPT © Ted Strutz

Sixty Years

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{This is a response to Friday Fictioneers, a photograph-inspired 100-word weekly prompt.  Photo provided by Ted Strutz. I’m afraid I went over the limit, by five words:  I could not make the rhythm work, without them. 

Forgive me.  

This collection of black-and-white and sepia pictures seemed to me, to evoke the story of a long marriage.  My parents’ own marriage lasted just short of sixty years, until my mother’s death. 

This incident devastated my father, whose love seemed quite single-minded.  Although my father rarely fished, he certainly had done so, in earnest, when trying to catch his bride.   

You should be aware, there is some irony in this poem, since, in her later years, my mother grew quite deaf.

Now that my father, too , has passed, I like to think they are back together–after their forced separation–and have begun to enjoy year sixty-one.}

Mom, with her cardigan,

Dad, with his pole:

So highly unlikely to wed.

Mama, so proper,

And Daddy, so droll,

Could hardly share one double bed.

Yet, Dad would be suitor,

Cajole her, and woo her,

And Mom, his entreaties would hear.

His pleas to recruit her,

Imploring with fervor—

Dumb luck!—would not fall on deaf ears.

As their marriage grew longer,

The grays and the sepias

Morphed, into reds, blues and greens;

The duet of their song,

Now, a dyspeptic warble,

Conflated, with infantile screams.

From now on, children gone,

To the faintest of songs,

They will dance in the deafness of dreams.

Copyright 2019 Andrea Ledew

For another poem of love with not quite the happy ending, read The Enclosed Garden.

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  11. otakuaegyochan

    I love the contrastive tools you used to show how different, and unlikely to end up together, they were. Despite how different, they had one important thing in common, their love for each other. <3 Wonderful poem.

    Reply

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