Behind Every Marriage
“Marriage takes love out of the mind and places it responsibly in the world.” -Wendell Berry
Behind every marriage
(good or bad)
is a love story
the contents of which
no one particularly cares,
especially the children,
if there are any.
And yet, the story,
if told well, is always
a good one
and deserves to be archived,
if not in the library of congress,
then in the memory of the soil
as a chronicle of love’s failure
to go away
even if the ones
who cultivated it
failed to foster its fruition;
for even a love that fails
has done its job,
has instilled in its hosts
a definition of loneliness
worth sharing and worth
dying towards
***
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Photo by Angela Marie Henriette /Flickr
Perfect. Thank you.