Wedding Poetry

I have returned, friends, from a rather protracted absence that has seen my wedding and honeymoon. I'm happy to announce that my new wife and I are settling in nicely. I wrote this poem on the occasion of my wife's birthday, but it fits the theme of an epithalamium. Epithalamiums are not traditionally written by the groom, so I adopted the voice of a kindly well-wisher to the bride. Admirable efforts at the form can also be found below. As always I am indebted to the sapphires of their imagery that I have shamelessly burgled from their unguarded estates.

Epithalamium

            Beneath the wedding bough

            Spring the saplings of this union.

            Their branches twine together, hand in hand,

            Their veins become the midnight kissers.

            The mad hour of cake,

            Handshakes, and pictures

            Is the baroque pageant for something else.

            For a oneness cutting rivers through a field.

            This ceremony: a cup to taste that river

            Whose polishing fluve will

            Surely rust away the wedding rings

            That are mere baubles of this eon’s pageant.

            Your love gathers it’s lakes into oceans

            Where you will drink everlasting

            To feed the wide, eternal oak

            That only yesterday was two saplings.

Epithalamium by Sappho

Epithalamion by ee cummings 

Marriage by William Carlos Williams

Epithalamium by Matthew Rohrer  

Epithalamium by George Barker