Peter Meinke

Peter Meinke Poems

Peter Meinke Biography

Peter Meinke (born 1932) is an American poet and author. He has published 17 books of poems and short stories. The Piano Tuner, won the 1986 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. His poetry has received many awards, including 2 NEA Fellowships and 3 prizes from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and other magazines. Meinke and his wife, the artist Jeanne Clark, have lived in St. Petersburg, Florida since 1966. For 27 years, Meinke was a professor at Eckerd College, where he was a director of the EC Writing Workshop. In February 2004, he was inducted as a foundation member into the Eckerd College Phi Beta Kappa chapter, Zeta of Florida. He also served on the faculty of the Eckerd College's Third Annual Writers in Paradise Conference in January 2007. From 2003 through 2005, he held the Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University.)

The Best Poem Of Peter Meinke

The First Marriage

for Gretchen and Herb: June 15, 1991


imagine the very first marriage a girl
and boy trembling with some inchoate
need for ceremony a desire for witness:
inventing formality like a wheel or a hoe

in a lost language in a clearing too far from here
a prophet or a prophetess intoned to the lovers
who knelt with their hearts cresting
like the unnamed ocean thinking This is true

thinking they will never be alone again
though planets slip their tracks and fish
desert the sea repeating those magic sounds
meaning I do on this stone below
this tree before these friends yes in body
and word my darkdream my sunsong yes I do I do

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