One Night (edit #2)

[milo]

for me ing words, gerunds or other always seem to weaken a word the more you use the weaker a poem becomes. i wonder if huddled would work better for an opener. i'd also try and make it a tight as possible, remove anything that doesn't help.

i first got the feeling of eloping but it isn't doesn't feel like an elopement. more like have a night away from the kids. the last line hooks back to the first stanza it has a sad quality about it. and also a bit of joy

huddled
a planned getaway
......

use words that suite,[no] instead of [foregoing]

I have no prejudice for or against ing words, with the exception of loving a good fling of any sort. As a gerund it is a word of action, which to me is a good thing in a poem, it's in the moment.

Huddling can be changed to "in a huddle", but that's more words. Huddled for me brings up more "in a doorway" than on a football field.

I'm thinking.

Huddling in this case is an active participle, not a gerund. The reason to avoid it, generally, in your writing is because it is passive voice. You don't see it because you have implied the pronoun and the verb (they, are). The active form would be huddled, but then you couldn't imply the pronoun as it would switch to second person so you would have to write "they huddled". In this case, though I generally prefer active voice, I prefer the economy of "huddling". Of course you abandon this economy in the very next line by including 2 pronouns , one of them the very one you implied so it might not be a bad idea to switch to all active voice to see what happens.