Was That The Day

(giving my little girl away)

I had been reading Stephen Fry’s “An Ode Less Travelled” about the Rondeau Redouble, a poetic form with a particularly challenging pattern and thought that I might try to write a poem to read at my eldest daughter’s wedding breakfast. I failed because I found the pattern of rhyme and rhythm too daunting and, moreover, there was too much else to occupy my mind.

However, on returning home after a tiring but strangely refreshing week in Torquay, following the wedding, minding our granddaughter, whilst the newly-weds were on a brief honeymoon in Portugal, this came to me in relatively quick time. Interesting how the creative process works sometimes; allowing time for gestation and incubation is the key, perhaps?

This poem was shortlisted for the Marriott Love Poems competition, run nationally in March 2011.

(Read the Poem)