On Removing the Wedding Band
As though undreaming the mountain
from the sea or tweezering hands from
a watch, a quick-fix change of regimes:
a democracy lost to a monarchy, an empty sudden
village, and elsewhere the wedding party lining up
like a lost tribe of refugees. As though a reverse
whisper of vows into a pageant of elegant ears
when the heat in the O cooled its "till death do us"
and the storm inside seething below
the flowers, gowns, and cake, its own Institution.
Copyright Credit: Major Jackson, "Urban Renewal XVIII" from Hoops: Poems. . Copyright © 2006 by Major Jackson. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc..
Source: Hoops: Poems. (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2006)