A Wedding on Earth (Excerpt)
From A WEDDING ON EARTH
"That all the woods may answer, and your eccho ring."
--Edmund Spenser
Marriage is a field where the planet’s skin
stretches and wakes open in fertile seeds,
moving patterns through couples. They begin
as shadowed furrows, whose every sowing leads
time-fed opposites, soaked in day and night,
to reach each others' height.
Goddesses, gods of weddings, help this pair
pair with abundance, to curl wide and alive
with each leaf they send through the long beauty.
Grow them with the roots and the care to thrive.
Harvest them, where they strive.
Let your bodies make a body of bodies—cool
With the pores of a question, rich and warm
With answers quickening to beat and roll and spool
Through the lost space anchored only by love's vast charm,
till pools of kiss and hope and remembering meet,
crossed in a sculpting heat.
Enter, oh, enter the language of your skins,
where motion mentions silence, and words spill light
over the actual air; let your touch begin
spinning separate souls in one open flight
towards one believed delight.
Marriage is the mirror and crucible
Where a true plain face turns to see its own
Fullness empty, its emptiness made full
In the shadows that blended love and bone,
Half-invisible, burned clear by the light,
Cast under mutual sight.
Goddesses, gods of weddings, press your hearts
Wide to reflect the earth, till they touch and share
Knowledge, patience, consciousness—human arts—
In wild bodies, and intersperse, and dare
Bend in the planet’s care.
Now, goddesses, gods, make marriage. Take your hands
in the sight of these people and the earth,
and one bird finds rest in a valleyed cove,
and more birds take flight in new kinds of birth.
Touch your hands. Touch words. Oh, now turn and bless
each with that happiness—
your family, earth, friends, guests and the binding day.\
Open us with a heart to hear every test,
brave to reach everything we will need to say,
strong to hold our silences, find our rest—
wise, to believe love best.
"A Wedding on Earth," full version published in Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2007) and Spells (Wesleyan University Press, 2013)