also re:"newlyweds", or I can't remember if I posted this before

[thanate]

Because a couple of grauwulf's friends are having painful relationship problems, and it makes me want to get this calligraphed and hang it up as a reminder:

There are greater things than wedding vows:
Great stones, magna cartae,
crafted in the names of government or God to withstand the weight of centuries
after the echoes of our brief lives have faded.

Which of us will be remembered when the highways of our great nation have cracked across and gone back into soil?

Within the compass of our earthly days
    (and how much more can we now encompass, bounded as we are by flesh?)
the greatest things in a human life
    (joinings, births, decisions made, roads taken:
    changes undertaken for better or for worse,
    from which there is no turning back)
are all approached unready, unknowing,
with a promise and a leap of faith
    (a little word,
    a little act,
    trailing consequences through all our days)
and we grow into them as best we may.

Even with the best of goodwill some seedlings die,
but let us plant our love in the sun.
Let us join the points of our two lives
with promises like garden twine,
training them to grow together as the rose and the briar grew,
twined and entwining, mingling branches,
in the hope that by one last comfortable end
we will have grown higher together than either one might have alone.

Comments

[greta-k.livejournal.com]

Amen to that.

[laeticiav.livejournal.com]

That's ;lovely -- where does it come from?

[thanate.livejournal.com]

er, thanks. I wrote it while I was avoiding writing wedding vows instead. It was more what I had to say than a list of specific promises.

[laeticiav.livejournal.com]

Wow -- you have many talents :)
(PS something coming your way soon ... must see if I can dig up your address)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

most current address is here (http://thanate.livejournal.com/284678.html), although if you send to the old one, I'll still get it eventually.

I write a poem perhaps every year or two, when my brain turns up something to say that doesn't quite fit in essay form or get talked over first.