"Stories About Love / Wedding Poem for Ada & Lucas" by Jason Schneiderman

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 21, 2017   Stories About Love / Wedding Poem for Ada & Lucas   Jason Schneiderman

In one story, the lovers are two halves split by jealous gods, and in another story,   the lovers are victims of a wicked baby with a bow and arrow. In one story,   love means never touching, but exchanging a lot of handkerchiefs, and in another story,   love means a drastic change in brain chemistry that lasts a year, even though   the after effects are lifelong. In one story, love is the north star guiding sailors,   and in one story love is a sharp blade, a body of water, and a trophy all at once.   The truth is that love is nothing but itself, an axiomatic property of humankind,   like storytelling and explanation giving, which explains why everyone explains   love in stories, the way I once called it a form of disappearing, and my favorite   philosopher called it a holiday. Listen, storytelling animals: today, we say, love   is only love. Put down the crossbow, baby. Put down the handkerchief, Lancelot.   Put away the easy chair, Babs. Let's let love be felt in its touch, and be known by its face.   Let's let love speak Ada and Lucas, and then let's let love be silent.            Copyright © 2017 Jason Schneiderman. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "This poem was written for the wedding of the poet Ada Limón and Lucas Marquardt. When Ada asked me to write a poem for the ceremony, I was both intimidated and honored. The first drafts were about what I know of love—because my poems usually start when there's a truth I can't tell in prose—but those drafts were all terribly flat. I started thinking about Plato's Symposium on love, and how I love the story told by Aristophanes, even though it's become a bit of a cliché. Marriage is an institution with a history, and as I began to think about the ways that love has been personified, explained, and understood, I realized I could put the particular and the universal in tension." —Jason Schneiderman   Jason Schneiderman is the author of Primary Source (Red Hen Press, 2016). He teaches at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY.   Photo credit: Marion Ettlinger Poetry by Schneiderman   Primary Source (Red Hen Press, 2016) "A Love Song" by William Carlos Williams "A Blessing for Wedding" by Jane Hirshfield "The Forms of Love" by George Oppen Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038