Most wedding songs look upward and forward: they bless, promise and praise. Dave Bonta's "Little wedding song" does something quieter and stranger. Its speaker places us "on the hill where we wed" and predicts not eternal devotion but laughter. "I expect we shall laugh" is so offhand that it takes a moment to see how much it claims. The poem never says whether the couple is standing on the hill now or picturing a return to it. That vagueness lets the wedding feel like a place as much as a day.
The first thing to notice is who gets laughed at. The stanza break after "laugh" leaves the word hanging, and then comes a run of three "at"s: "at us at this world / at what a peak we perceive." With no punctuation, the targets blur together. The couple laughs at themselves, then at the world, then at the grand view they think they have. "Peak" can be the literal top of the hill, or the high point of happiness, or the feeling that marriage has carried them above everyone else. "Perceive" is a puffed-up word for seeing, and "what a peak we perceive" is an inflated way to say "what a view." The speaker mocks that pomposity in advance. Set against the title's "little," it also suggests the hill is a modest one, and the couple's summit smaller than it feels. That reading is an inference, but the poem's deflating tone supports it.
The turn comes with "but." The laughter, the speaker says, "will do no hurt / to the quiet." Calling the quiet something that could be hurt is the poem's boldest move. Quiet is normally an absence, yet here it is a presence that laughter might bruise. The poem does not say what the quiet is. It could be the stillness of the hill, or the calm underneath the marriage, or the hush after the song ends. All three fit, and the ambiguity helps. The litotes "no hurt" is also gentle where "will not disturb" would be flat. The point seems to be that this couple can be silly and serious in the same breath, and neither cancels the other.
The form does the same work. There are three couplets, no end rhyme, and no punctuation. Only "I" is capitalised, which is a quiet joke in itself, since the "I" who "expects" turns into "we" by the next line and stays there. The lines are short and nearly all monosyllables: six syllables, six, five, seven, six, and then a final line, "to the quiet," that is the shortest of all. The poem shrinks as it ends, until the last words are the quiet itself.
The sound is held together by small echoes instead of rhyme. "Hill" and "will" chime across the stanzas. The long *e* of "we," "peak" and "perceive" gives the middle lines a brightness that fits the laughing. Then a run of hard *t*s closes the lines, in "expect," "what," "that," "hurt" and "quiet." They land like soft footsteps and keep the poem from drifting into mere sweetness. Because of the enjambment, "do no hurt" can almost be read as a complete thought before "to the quiet" arrives, like a hush settling after it.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it rewrites a familiar occasion. A wedding song usually makes vows or celebrates. This one makes a forecast, and a hedged one: "I expect." That is an unusually honest sort of promise, because it admits the future is uncertain. It values the ability to see yourselves from a little distance and find yourselves funny, and it suggests that kind of humour is a form of closeness. The poem also practises what it describes. It is small, wry and unshowy, and it ends by stepping back and leaving the silence undisturbed.