David J Bauman

Micah‘s Friday love poem post got me thinking that it’s been some time since we’ve had a proper Thursday Love Poem feature here on The Dad Poet.  If you’re a new visitor and don’t know what a Thursday Love Poem is, you can check out the original here.  The feature is based on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s  poem called “Thursday,” which goes like this:

AND if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday–
So much is true.

And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday,–yes–but what
Is that to me?

Basically, a candidate for the Thursday Love Poem feature is “not your grandmother’s love poem,” if it’s a love poem at all. Sometimes, like the original it’s based on, it’s an anti-love poem but at the very least a proper TLP does not approach the topic of romance in any way that you normally would expect. “Killing Mark” by Richard Blanco is a good, creative example.

For today’s feature, we have three poems from a reading by Mark Strand done 16 years ago, starting with “The Couple,” of which Mark says at the beginning of this video, “Something in me wishes this wasn’t my poem.”