Once upon a time, a lovely dark haired anaesthetist, of the German kind, asked a lady writer to embark on a top secret mission. A mission to combine words and joy and love.
A secret literary quest, the findings of which were only to be revealed on the day of his wedding to his true love.

xxx

Words about love… she mused, chewing the end of her biro.
She doodled love hearts on her note pad.
A piece of prose, perhaps. A witty, sincere serving of words with just the right amount of love stuff to wet her listeners’ eyes.
She drew flowers around the hearts on her note pad.
How about a love poem?
To rhyme, or not to rhyme…

“It was awfully hot in Havana,
when first he laid eyes on Joanna.
As she entered the bar,
he watched from afar,
feigning a nonchalant manner.”

Hmm…

The more she thought, the more she wrote.
The more she wrote, the more she scribbled out.
Why was it so tricky to write about love? People had been falling into it ever since people were invented.
She re-read her book shelves, devouring all love associated literature.
Immersed herself in the sonnets of Shakespeare.
Trawled through Byron and Keats and Shelley, distracted by Oscar Wilde along the way.

Her pursuit of suitable phrases and descriptive narrative became ever more elusive.
She collected page upon page of words, sifted through great heaps of alphabets in order to discover the most delectable letter combinations.
Time and again she wriggled free from the clutches of the deadly cliché trap that threatened her writery integrity. Wondered that she hadn’t become hyperglycaemic with the sickly sweet words of love that persisted in pouring, embarrassingly, from her pen.
She was no Indiana Jones; what had she been thinking, taking on such a quest?!
Full idiot.

Fearing that she may have to admit defeat, the lady writer gathered up the scatterings of crumpled pages and half finished sentences that attested to her wedding word attempts.
An untidy paragraph caught her eye.
Hope flickering, she rummaged in the recycling for a remembered reject.
Heart lifting, she leafed back through her note book.
Perhaps a verse or two…not necessarily a tale of the bride and groom, but still a tale, about love.
Armed with sellotape and scissors she began to stick and snip, a poem shaping itself before her eyes:

He wined her and he dined her,
seduced her with good taste.
She opened his ears to opera,
he decorated hers with diamonds.

He bought her gifts from chic boutiques
and smells with expensive names;
greedily drank in her pleasure,
drunk on the beauty of her smile.

She savoured the wines and the edible art,
cherished his extravagant courtship.
He opened her eyes to opulence,
she covered his with kisses.

She made him cheese on toast
and wrote him a poem about
priceless happiness and
true love being free.