Our marriage is old enough to vote now

and on this our porcelain anniversary

I vote “Yes, I do,”  over and over again.

A score of fine filigree plates I will gift us,

two broken to match the fragile times,

the eighteen days past the towers fall

when we married amidst grief and joy.

Our Noritake sacraments survives the bombings

of a blasted world, the cracking, fractures,

the buffing of our mistakes to a translucent

perfection, all frozen details rimmed with gold.

Cancer is etched on the lip, but so

is cure, joy, longevity, beauty, respect,

and the watermark underneath, our keepsake

forever, irreplaceable love.

Kristen is my second wife. We got married  eighteen days after 9-11, when the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell in a terrorist attack on September 11,  2001. Thus if you do the math of the second stanza you get one score. (20) minus two = 18. Eighteen days past 9/11 makes the date September 29, 2001.

It is also our eighteenth anniversary.  The irony of that number in our lives today was too good to leave out of the  Poem.

The typical gift for an 18th wedding anniversary is porcelain.  Thus China and Noritake reference.

For those aware of history the Noritake factory was bombed and destroyed by Allied planes in WOrld War Two.  Only the China it produced survived the bombing. © 9 hours ago,

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