! Lines From The Pub Poem by Michael Shepherd

You,
slim but well-nourished,
not unhandsome, dark, perhaps of Middle East descent,
who's just come in the door at the speed of
a second-ring bellhop
carrying a neat cone of not many flowers
from the florist's down the road

but unsmiling, focussed, almost fiercely anxious
as if you were a well-trained rifleman
yet fearing that you might have missed one vital point in training -

what are you bringing from an anxious past
on this, perhaps, lifetime's vital day
for the girl already waiting there whom
alas I cannot see to burden with my assumptions -

what are you bringing from your past
besides those flowers, to take
into your anxiously-hoped-for future together?

No, you may not indeed, right now, be worthy of 'her hand';
- nor may she, indeed, of yours;
that's, perhaps,

the miracle of marriage.