This weekend, a group of my friends and I celebrated May Day a little late. Being of a literary mindset, we decided to hold a late-night picnic complete with good company, decent-to-good wine, and good poetry.

It was a laid-back affair, a gathering of just under twenty crazy cats bundled up against the cold May night. We had stacks of poetry books and an iPad, letting us flip through and find just the right poem for our moods. The poems read were insanely varied, from Tim Burton’s “Match Boy and Stick Girl in Love” to Shakespeare’s “Sonnet No. 2” to Dante Alighieri’s “Tanto gentile e tanto nostre pare” to dirty limericks recited when the mood got too serious. We laughed, we chatted, we decided that “The Jabberwocky” was really written by Robert Burns.

The poetry reading was a success. We sat out in the cold for four hours, leaving just before midnight, carrying the tea lights that had lit our circle as lanterns as we wandered back into the Edinburgh night.