I woke up one morning with the expression “bumps in the road” in my head. So I designed a poem around it. This was written for a friend of mine who was getting married. The moral: You may trip up along the way, but just keep heading down the path together. 

Winding through the brilliant wood, 
    Where lovers amble berry-fed, 
Runs a narrow earthen aisle — 
    Irksome hurdles in its pebbled tread. 

With maples tow’ring to the sky,
Lining ev’ry random crook,
It only follows that about the way, 
    Vie cords of interruptive root. 
 
Along the shadowed leafy course, 
    O’er which the owl muses tranquil, 
Slumberous stones spring coldly forth, 
    Commingling with unwitting ankles. 
 
Bobbing between root and stone, 
    Like some angry nest a-swarming, 
Tufts of grasses yellow-green, 
    Confuse the path without warning. 
 
And fallen from the arms above, 
    Lie blackened limbs and nodeless branches, 
Whose fingered webs of tangle twigs, 
    Outstretch before all advances. 
 
Ah, the corridor does not exist, 
    Of forest floor unabated; 
The trick is to accept sudden missteps, 
    And pursue the road nature created, 
    Like a set of vines forever braided.