Please help! I have been asked to do a reading at a friend's wedding on Easter Saturday. It will be a civil ceremony so there can be no religious references in whatever I choose to read.

Does anybody out there have any idea of a poem / reading that would be suitable??

All suggestions gratefully received!

Thanks

Cara Barry carabarry@hotmail.com

-- Cara Barry (carabarry@hotmail.com), February 01, 2000

Answers

There are whole books of wedding poems out there. One that comes to mind is To Woo and to Wed: Contemporary Poets on Love and Marriage, edited by Michael Blumenthal. Published by Poseidon Press in 1992

-- ilza (ilza@pobox.com), February 01, 2000.

Most like an arch, this marriage by John Ciardi

Most like an arch--an entrance which upholds

and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.

Mass made idea, and idea held in place.

A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.

Most like an arch--two weaknesses that lean

into a strength. Two fallings become a firm.

Two joined abeyances become a term

naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.

Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,

what's strong and separate falters. All I do

at piling stone on stone apart from you

is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss

I am no more than upright and unset.

It is by falling in and in we make

the all-bearing point, for one another's sake,

in faultess failing, raised by our own weight.

-- ilza (ilza@pobox.com), February 01, 2000.