For Rebecca and Hamish
Along the dale to the wedding church
the fields are fluffy with meadowsweet –
ditches and verges foaming with it.
Perhaps a tanker has overturned,
and shed its load of banana milkshake?
No, that’s not it; something more honeyed,
more artificially confected;
a familiar ingredient
from your pantry at birthday-cake time:
nothing to do with botany.
You could sprinkle it over strawberries.
I plunge my arms in, and then my face.
Sniff this, I say to the wedding guests –
as one by one I hand them a sprig,
What does the scent remind you of?
One by one, they fail to tell me,
although on the table just over there
is displayed the clue, three dazzling tiers of it.
Fleur Adcock, who died on 10 October, wrote this poem as a ‘post-wedding present’ for friends who were married in July. As she explained in an accompanying note: ‘Many years ago an Irish musician told me that meadowsweet smells like icing sugar. Indeed it does, but it’s not the sort of thing that would occur to you – unless perhaps you were in the presence of a wedding cake with icing all over it.’
