brief lesson on marriage

I asked my wife
to check the hive,
to see
if the hive
were burning.
(I had 
no wife, no hive.)
Yes, she said,
rising up
from where she’d
been
embroidering
a new wind. Then
—Yes,
she said again,
only this time
a bit more softly.

Credit

Copyright © 2019 by G. C. Waldrep. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 27, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“There were originally two other ‘brief lessons’—‘brief lesson on corpses’ and ‘brief lesson on scars.’ On the whole, I preferred marriage to corpses, or scars, but we are not always the ones who get to make such choices.”
—G. C. Waldrep