My friend is getting married in early May and she JUST asked me to read at the ceremony. I'm excited but I don't want to mess this up either. I told her I'd come up with a few poems and she could choose between them. The only problem is she needs to know by tomorrow evening! Ack.

The poem doesn't have to be about weddings or love per se, but it should be appropriate to the occasion.

If I had more time, I'd hit up the library and the bookstore this weekend, but I can't.

I found a couple so far: one by Eavan Boland (who I adore) and one by Donald Justice. I need more suggestions! (Do I sound as desperate as I feel?) I looked at William Carlos Williams, Seamus Heaney and e.e. cummings, but didn't find anything particularly useful (even though I like them all).

In addition, I've decided that my taste in poetry runs toward the modernist, bleak and restrained.

My favorite love poem is by Emily Dickinson:

Wild Nights! Wild Nights!

Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,--
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!
---
From: http://www.poetrypreviews.com/poets/poet-dickinson.html

"Wild Nights, ..." speaks of the security and comfort of loving someone, comparing the heart with a ship in port. What is interesting about this poem is that it could so easily have made a comparison to someone waiting for a ship to finally come home, bringing a loved one who has been off to sea.
However, DIckinson creates a slight paradox, in which the ship is already at harbor, anchored, and yet she and her love are "rowing" in Eden -- in bliss. The poem also uses the conditional tense, indicating a longing for her loved one -- who is absent."

here are two i considered for mine - i think i have the three i used at home....i'll see if i can find them.

Love does not consist in gazing at one another.
But in looking outward together in the same direction.
Do not seek perfection in each other.
Do not seek to make the other into your own image,
or to remake yourself into another's image.
What each most truly is will be known by the other.
It is that truth of you which must be loved.
Many things will change, but change is not the enemy of love.
Change is the enemy only of any attempt to possess.
May all that is good and true and beautiful
abide with you now and always.
Anonymous

Rainer Maria Rilke (from "letters to a young poet").
It is ...good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preperation....Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person...it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances

Here's one from Kahil Gibran (from "The Prophet")

"On Marriage"
Then Almitra spoke again and said, "And what of Marriage, master?"

And he answered saying:

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

i'm not sure of the url, it's either loveblender or blenderoflove do a search on google or something, there's a website full of love poems there.

jt

About the Emily Dickinson poem (I love her too) - that one is said to be one of the poems directed to the woman she loved, her brother's wife!! :)

This is what I was asked to read, unfortun. don't have the source ~WS


Sooner or later we begin to understand that love is more than verses on valentines, and romance in the movies. We begin to know that love is here and now, real and true, the most important thing in our lives. For love is the creator of our favourite memories and the foundation of our fondest dreams.
 
 Love is a promise that is always kept, a fortune that can never be spent, a seed that can flourish in even the most unlikely of places. And this radiance that never fades, this mysterious and magical joy, is the greatest treasure of all - one known only by those who love.

[deleted]

Oooh...my favorite love poem, maybe ever.

"He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"
by W.B. Yeats
(the body of the poem is gender-neutral):

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.