I’ve just returned from a manic long weekend in NYC, and I promise to get around to a review later this week (it’ll likely be of Emily Schultz’s heavenly Heaven Is Small), but in the meantime I could use your help. I’m at the age where my summer social agenda is largely dominated by weddings, and I happen to be involved in some of them. I have two weddings this summer where I’ve been asked to do a reading of some sort of love poem. The thing is, I’m not bursting with ideas. My first thought was e.e. cummings’ “i carry your heart with me,” but that reminds me of some bad movie I once saw with Cameron Diaz. I’d also like something that might be a little less well known. Do you have any love poems you love that you’d suggest? A little crowd sourcing could be particularly helpful on this one!
In Her Shoes is EXACTLY why I nixed “i carry your heart with me.” Pity, since it’s such a beautiful poem, but I wanted a love poem with as little baggage as possible. If you like cummings, what about somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond? Full disclosure: it’s read in Hannah and Her Sisters. But maybe Woody Allen gets a pass?
I can suggest more, but I’d need to know more about the bride and groom, and the kind of ceremony they’re having.
I have read Dance Me To The End of Love by Leonard Cohen TWICE at weddings. Once I read a Neil Diamond song, but that was sort of an inside joke. And once I read a really beautiful passage from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, which I posted here http://www.picklemethis.com/2007/06/18/in-honour-of-love/
Those are great suggestions, ladies! One of the readings is actually for my Grandma, so I’ll probably keep that on the sweeter side, and the other for friends who are lawyers, but the bride is a huge reader and lover of words.
And Kerry, I love love love that Virginia passage. It makes me want to save it for my OWN wedding one day! I haven’t read The Voyage Out, but I really should.
Hey Jen,
Check your email. I’ve sent you one that I used (not by me!) when I was in a wedding.
Steph
How about milking the something borrowed, something blue angle with this one by Langston Hughes…
The Dream Keeper
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
“The Good Morrow”
by John Donne
I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did till we loved? Were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, both thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
Maybe it’s not quite PG enough for a wedding… but I love this poem
Beneath My Hands
by Leonard Cohen
Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing fallen sparrows.
Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.
I am speechless
because you have fallen beside me
because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.
I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me hunter.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.
I want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.
Oh Leonard, I do love him. Probably a little too scandalous for my grandma’s, but maybe for the other, and still a great love poem.
(Also not grandma appropriate: “The Cinnamon Peeler.” Hot damn, that’s some sexy verse!)
hot damn, indeed!