Poem: A Wedding Poem

I wrote this because I wanted to express a central mystery in the wonderful business of a wedding. It aims to address the way marriage is a way of enshrining people’s sense of compatability, which is such a necessary but brave part of a committed couple’s life.

A Wedding Poem
September, 2019
By Richard D North

Here you are,
making a proper go of it,
with a licence and all.

I love the Town Hall bit:
it’s so prosaic yet moody.
It’s just the place
to wrap
a mystery
in some
formality
and little
mumbo jumbo.

It’s the greatest impertinence,
and the commonest too,
the pretence
that we can look into another’s soul
or even really
our own.
Rather,
pinning down
those interiorities
is like
hunting for a skylark
high in a summer sky.

I have been startled by
the egotism of saints,
and generous go-getters,
and heroes gulping down oblivion,
and spectrumy characters
who hit the nail on the head
and purblind
people people.

And almost every day
heaps on yet
more surprises:
in car parks and cafes,
in municipal gardens
and cinema queues,
I meet
people who are
suddenly familiar.
But on reflection
or inspection
those friendly interiorities-
probably not especially dark
or difficult –
are as foreign
as a night sky
and alien as
a parallel universe.

I am not licensed for benedictions
but I love the idea
of having faith
that one has found compatibility,
bucking the odds,
like a blind
sculptor
releasing
his Pieta
from the numb marble.
It’s never, I guess,
a matter of a jigsaw fit
nor even a
Farrow and Ball
harmony.

Two interiorities
decide to avoid collision
where possible,
and to conspire or collude.
Sensible people,
just as fools do,
throw down their chips,
and gauntlets
and cudgels,
and test the proposition
that their souls
will
get lucky together.

We channel the Owl and the Pussycat
who went to sea
to the distant land
where they could dance
hand in hand
on a moonlit beach.