Non Religious Wedding Poems and Vows

The construction of a woman: a woman is not made of flesh of bone and sinew belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe. She is manufactured like a sports sedan. She is retooled, refitted and redesigned every decade. Cecile had been seduction itself in college. She wriggled through bars like a satin eel, her hips and ass promising, her mouth pursed in the dark red lipstick of desire. She visited in '68 still wearing skirts tight to the knees, dark red lipstick, while I danced through Manhattan in mini skirt, lipstick pale as apricot milk, hair loose as a horse's mane. Oh dear, I thought in my superiority of the moment, whatever has happened to poor Cecile? She was out of fashion, out of the game, disqualified, disdained, dis- membered from the club of desire. Look at pictures in French fashion magazines of the 18th century: century of the ultimate lady fantasy wrought of silk and corseting. Paniers bring her hips out three feet each way, while the waist is pinched and the belly flattened under wood. The breasts are stuffed up and out offered like apples in a bowl. The tiny foot is encased in a slipper never meant for walking. On top is a grandiose headache: hair like a museum piece, daily ornamented with ribbons, vases, grottoes, mountains, frigates in full sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy of a hairdresser turned loose. The hats were rococo wedding cakes that would dim the Las Vegas strip. Here is a woman forced into shape rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh: a woman made of pain. How superior we are now: see the modern woman thin as a blade of scissors. She runs on a treadmill every morning, fits herself into machines of weights and pulleys to heave and grunt, an image in her mind she can never approximate, a body of rosy glass that never wrinkles, never grows, never fades. She sits at the table closing her eyes to food hungry, always hungry: a woman made of pain. A cat or dog approaches another, they sniff noses. They sniff asses. They bristle or lick. They fall in love as often as we do, as passionately. But they fall in love or lust with furry flesh, not hoop skirts or push up bras rib removal or liposuction. It is not for male or female dogs that poodles are clipped to topiary hedges. If only we could like each other raw. If only we could love ourselves like healthy babies burbling in our arms. If only we were not programmed and reprogrammed to need what is sold us. Why should we want to live inside ads? Why should we want to scourge our softness to straight lines like a Mondrian painting? Why should we punish each other with scorn as if to have a large ass were worse than being greedy or mean? When will women not be compelled to view their bodies as science projects, gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained? When will a woman cease to be made of pain?

THE SENTENCE Perhaps I can make it plain by analogy. Imagine a machine, not yet assembled, Each part being quite necessary To the functioning of the whole: if the job is fumbled And a vital piece mislaid The machine is quite valueless, The workers will not be paid. It is just the same when constructing a sentence But here we must be very careful And lay stress on the extreme importance Of defining our terms: nothing is as simple As it seems at first regard. "Sentence" might well mean to you The amorous rope or twelve years" hard. No, by "sentence" we mean, quite simply, words Put together like the parts of a machine. Now remember we must have a verb: verbs Are words of action like Murder, Love, or Sin. But these might be nouns, depending On how you use them – Already the plot is thickening. Except when the mood is imperative; that is to say A command is given like Pray, Repent, or Forgive (Dear me, these lessons get gloomier every day) Except, as I was saying, when the mood is gloomy – I mean imperative We need nouns, or else of course Pronouns; words like Maid, Man, Wedding or Divorce. A sentence must make sense. Sometimes I believe Our lives are ungrammatical. I guess that some of you Have misplaced the direct object: the longer I live The less certain I feel of anything I do. But now I begin To digress. Write down these simple sentences:-- I am sentenced: I love: I murder: I sin.

1 You, once a belle in Shreveport, with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud, still have your dresses copied from that time, and play a Chopin prelude called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections float like perfume through the memory." Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life. Nervy, glowering, your daughter wipes the teaspoons, grows another way. 2 Banging the coffee-pot into the sink she hears the angels chiding, and looks out past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky. Only a week since They said: Have no patience. The next time it was: Be insatiable. Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save. Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm, a match burn to her thumbnail, or held her hand above the kettle's snout right inthe woolly steam. They are probably angels, since nothing hurts her anymore, except each morning's grit blowing into her eyes. 3 A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature, that sprung-lidded, still commodious steamer-trunk of tempora and mores gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers, the female pills, the terrible breasts of Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids. Two handsome women, gripped in argument, each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream across the cut glass and majolica like Furies cornered from their prey: The argument ad feminam, all the old knives that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours, ma semblable, ma soeur! 4 Knowing themselves too well in one another: their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn, the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn... Reading while waiting for the iron to heat, writing, My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun-- in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum, or, more often, iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird, dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life. 5 Dulce ridens, dulce loquens, she shaves her legs until they gleam like petrified mammoth-tusk. 6 When to her lute Corinna sings neither words nor music are her own; only the long hair dipping over her cheek, only the song of silk against her knees and these adjusted in reflections of an eye. Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before an unlocked door, that cage of cages, tell us, you bird, you tragical machine-- is this fertillisante douleur? Pinned down by love, for you the only natural action, are you edged more keen to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown her household books to you, daughter-in-law, that her sons never saw? 7 "To have in this uncertain world some stay which cannot be undermined, is of the utmost consequence." Thus wrote a woman, partly brave and partly good, who fought with what she partly understood. Few men about her would or could do more, hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore. 8 "You all die at fifteen," said Diderot, and turn part legend, part convention. Still, eyes inaccurately dream behind closed windows blankening with steam. Deliciously, all that we might have been, all that we were--fire, tears, wit, taste, martyred ambition-- stirs like the memory of refused adultery the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years. 9 Not that it is done well, but that it is done at all? Yes, think of the odds! or shrug them off forever. This luxury of the precocious child, Time's precious chronic invalid,-- would we, darlings, resign it if we could? Our blight has been our sinecure: mere talent was enough for us-- glitter in fragments and rough drafts. Sigh no more, ladies. Time is male and in his cups drinks to the fair. Bemused by gallantry, we hear our mediocrities over-praised, indolence read as abnegation, slattern thought styled intuition, every lapse forgiven, our crime only to cast too bold a shadow or smash the mold straight off. For that, solitary confinement, tear gas, attrition shelling. Few applicants for that honor. 10 Well, she's long about her coming, who must be more merciless to herself than history. Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge breasted and glancing through the currents, taking the light upon her at least as beautiful as any boy or helicopter, poised, still coming, her fine blades making the air wince but her cargo no promise then: delivered palpable ours.

"The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat"-- A Diversity of Creatures The Soldier may forget his Sword, The Sailorman the Sea, The Mason may forget the Word And the Priest his Litany: The Maid may forget both jewel and gem, And the Bride her wedding-dress-- But the Jew shall forget Jerusalem Ere we forget the Press! Who once hath stood through the loaded hour Ere, roaring like the gale, The Harrild and the Hoe devour Their league-long paper-bale, And has lit his pipe in the morning calm That follows the midnight stress-- He hath sold his heart to the old Black Art We call the daily Press. Who once hath dealt in the widest game That all of a man can play, No later love, no larger fame Will lure him long away. As the war-horse snuffeth the battle afar, The entered Soul, no less, He saith: "Ha! Ha!" where the trumpets are And the thunders of the Press! Canst thou number the days that we fulfill, Or the Times that we bring forth? Canst thou send the lightnings to do thy will, And cause them reign on earth? Hast thou given a peacock goodly wings, To please his foolishness? Sit down at the heart of men and things, Companion of the Press! The Pope may launch his Interdict, The Union its decree, But the bubble is blown and the bubble is pricked By Us and such as We. Remember the battle and stand aside While Thrones and Powers confess That King over all the children of pride Is the Press--the Press--the Press!

After the movie, when the lights come up, He takes her powdered hand behind the wings; She, all in yellow, like a buttercup, Lifts her white face, yearns up to him, and clings; And with a silent, gliding step they move Over the footlights, in familiar glare, Panther-like in the Tango whirl of love, He fawning close on her with idiot stare. Swiftly they cross the stage. O lyric ease! The drunken music follows the sure feet, The swaying elbows, intergliding knees, Moving with slow precision on the beat. She was a waitress in a restaurant, He picked her up and taught her how to dance. She feels his arms, lifts an appealing glance, But knows he spent last evening with Zudora; And knows that certain changes are before her. The brilliant spotlight circles them around, Flashing the spangles on her weighted dress. He mimics wooing her, without a sound, Flatters her with a smoothly smiled caress. He fears that she will someday queer his act; Feeling his anger. He will quit her soon. He nods for faster music. He will contract Another partner, under another moon. Meanwhile, 'smooth stuff.' He lets his dry eyes flit Over the yellow faces there below; Maybe he'll cut down on his drinks a bit, Not to annoy her, and spoil the show. . . Zudora, waiting for her turn to come, Watches them from the wings and fatly leers At the girl's younger face, so white and dumb, And the fixed, anguished eyes, ready for tears. She lies beside him, with a false wedding-ring, In a cheap room, with moonlight on the floor; The moonlit curtains remind her much of spring, Of a spring evening on the Coney shore. And while he sleeps, knowing she ought to hate, She still clings to the lover that she knew,— The one that, with a pencil on a plate, Drew a heart and wrote, 'I'd die for you.'

My soldier boy has crossed the sea To fight the foeman; But he'll come back to make of me And honest woman. So I am singing all day long, Despite blood-shedding; For though I know he's done me wrong, We'll end by wedding. My soldier boy is home again, So bold and scathless; But oh, my heart is numb with pain Because he's faithless. He's brought with him a French Mam'selle; They plan a marriage; Maybe I'll go - no one will know Of my miscarriage. My soldier boy has made his choice, She'll hold him to it; I tell myself that I rejoice, May he not rue it. But oh, that starry month of May, Love-words wild spoken! I stand alone and make no moan . . . My heart is broken.

I watch you walk up our front path, the entire right side of your body, stiff and unbending, your leg, dragging on the ground, your arm not moving. Six different times you ask me the date of our daughter's wedding, seem surprised each time, forget who called, though you can name obscure desert animals, and every detail of events that took place in 3 B.C. You complain now of pain in your muscles, of swimming at the Y where a 76 year old man tells you you swim too slowly. I imagine a world in which you cannot move. Most days, I force myself to look only into the past; remember you, singing and playing your guitar: "Black, black is the color of my true love's hair," you sang, and each time you came into a room how my love for you caught in my throat, how handsome you were, how strong and muscular, how the sun lit your blond hair. Now I pretend not to notice the trouble you have buttoning your shirt, and yes, I am terrified and no, I cannot tell you. The future is a murky lake. I am afraid of the monsters who wait just below its surface. Even in our mahogany bed, I am not safe. Each day, I swim toward everything I didn't want to know. Copyright © 1997 by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, all rights reserved.

I have done with love and lust, I reck not for gold or fame; I await familiar dust These frail fingers to reclaim: Not for me the tiger flame. Not for me the furnace glow, Rage of fire and ashen doom; To sweet earth my bones bestow Where above a lowly tomb January roses bloom. Fools and fools and fools are you Who your dears to fires confide; Give to Mother Earth her due: Flesh may waste but bone will bide,-- Let loved ones lie side by side. Let God's Acre ever dream; Shed your tears and blossoms bring; On age-burnished bone will gleam Crucifix and wedding ring: Graves are for sweet comforting. Curst be those who my remains Hurl to horror of the flames!

The deed has been done. Our new life has begun. Single life won't be missed. I'm filled with wedded bliss. A wondrous new beginning. Inside my heart is singing. I'm never looking back. You've made my soul relax. Each new day we grow together. Everyday has sunny weather. I've never known love as pure as this. I feel drunk and full of wedded bliss. With you, I have no reason to doubt. You make me whole, inside and out. Facing the future, together we stand. Walking life's roads, hand in hand.

This is for all the pretty girls, with necks choked with ashen pearls, and pricy shoes on your feet, and pinned up golden tresses, and virginal white dresses, ready to make love complete. Now when the wedding bells chime, it will be an ideal time, to think of the one you tossed. The one who bled true passion and whose love he would fashion. The good one, whose heart was crossed. And it is for your own sake, when you taste that angel cake, to think of the one not chosen. There's a gem on your finger, but you know something lingers, and thoughts of me are frozen

so cherished you are a possession of stars the galaxy's mass confined in my heart so cherished the pride a sky open wide folds in a pocket soft in my side So cherished the bliss a ocean's abyss weight of the deep contained in a kiss so cherished the night all mountains of height bend over trees witness the sight so cherished you are possession of stars the galaxy's vast space in my heart

Will you wear my ring you know what that means I love you for the rest of my life just say you'll be my wife it tells the world how much I love you and I know you already do will you wear my ring it's a perfect understanding we can love each other forever never apart from one another's heart it means everything will you wear my ring

Every kiss sends a shock through me Every touch makes my heart stop The way he looks a me when making love Makes my stomach turn into a knot I want to know everything about him I know this may sound just a little bit silly But I want to be with him forever And be Mrs. Joshua Lilly

I am flying I am screaming over the world with a light heart Eternity just seems inadequate tonight Just lying here so unaware of everything This is so much more than nothing These stars came out just for us I can't think of anything other than you here with me

You've always been there for me Right from the start. Everything you do Comes straight from the heart. When I think of you My heart fills with love. And this feeling my dear Is what life is made of. You've given me passion, love, And total bliss. And all it took Was just one kiss. I knew from the moment I first lay eyes on you That a life without you in it Would just never do. I am honored that you chose me To be your wedded wife, And by your side I'll stay For the rest of my life. I Love You

The things little things I can adore keep me wanting to reach a shore of you, a ending place beginning door through a key hole climb see you traced in life in private space

My love is everlasting, Expanding everyday, With every passing second, There's more than I can say. You are always with me, Inside my heart and head, And all that I can think of, Are things that you have said. You are my one and only, I hope you feel the same, I always want to be with you, To share the same last name.

We walked in oak cliff Down a street, Rosemount I believe a house, a dream we released this home It breathes,now underneath plastic, siding we conceive a life, a child That’s her room she could play My studio With windows build a entry way windows the kind that stick and resist Your fist on the frame But life exists In wood floors A scratch, on buffet what stories they tell what treasures in age

The wide Pacific waters And the Atlantic meet. With cries of joy they mingle, In tides of love they greet. Above the drowned ages A wind of wooing blows: — The red rose woos the lotos, The lotos woos the rose . . . The lotos conquered Egypt. The rose was loved in Rome. Great India crowned the lotos: (Britain the rose's home). Old China crowned the lotos, They crowned it in Japan. But Christendom adored the rose Ere Christendom began . . . The lotos speaks of slumber: The rose is as a dart. The lotos is Nirvana: The rose is Mary's heart. The rose is deathless, restless, The splendor of our pain: The flush and fire of labor That builds, not all in vain. . . . The genius of the lotos Shall heal earth's too-much fret. The rose, in blinding glory, Shall waken Asia yet. Hail to their loves, ye peoples! Behold, a world-wind blows, That aids the ivory lotos To wed the red red rose!

Each day soars by us longing to be caught Just to be noticed If I could stop time and be in your arms Forever Then time would be ours Each and every moment would be cherished As if it were the first, the last Love would never be taken for granted But appreciated and given without condition Trouble and sadness would be replaced with excitement For the time that is ours and is surely to come Because from this day forward I promise to you That our time is real and is simply waiting for us To notice

When I meet you Will you make us two I promise always to be true Ever faithful, through and through Walk hand in hand when troubles anew Down wrong paths, your goals to pursue The bond we have, will always accrue Aisle parade for our wedded debut

Baby you the key to my heart The love to my soul I hear your voice every were i go When i close my eye i see you in my vision My intuition setting like stint version I know my mind never play tricks on me That how i know you the one for me I swear i feel it, Honestly I dont know if you have a thing for me Dang I speak blasphemy I know i anit the man you lookinh for But i you give a chance Ill be the man you always dream of

Sitting alone in the sand dreaming The wind blowing, the waves crashing, it's all so beautiful But despite all of this, my mind is fixed on you Your eyes blue like the clear summer sky Your smile even prettier than all the sunsets combined This nature on the beach is nothing compared to you

Come away with me tonight Honey, with your spirit light and bright And your arms brave and broad for the flight Of love to the lofty nest of love Like doves pecking on a lone cove Wing to wing we rove Hand in hand like newly- wed termites we stray To find a palace where only we shall hold sway You my queen and I your queen on love-bed we lay Me and you tonight at the coast of doves.

Hazy thought of you spark mystic desires Imposed eyes vision words; Soft faint words I trace from your lips “I love you”

Almost the shell of a woman after the surgeon's knife! And almost a year to creep back into strength, Till the dawn of our wedding decennial Found me my seeming self again. We walked the forest together, By a path of soundless moss and turf. But I could not look in your eyes, And you could not look in my eyes, For such sorrow was ours -- the beginning of gray in your hair, And I but a shell of myself. And what did we talk of? -- sky and water, Anything, 'most, to hide our thoughts. And then your gift of wild roses, Set on the table to grace our dinner. Poor heart, how bravely you struggled To imagine and live a remembered rapture! Then my spirit drooped as the night came on, And you left me alone in my room for a while, As you did when I was a bride, poor heart. And I looked in the mirror and something said: "One should be all dead when one is half-dead -- Nor ever mock life, nor ever cheat love." And I did it looking there in the mirror -- Dear, have you ever understood?

I sit in my chair lifeless Knowing your not there I look back on the memories Seeing all you did was care I never see you anymore Just in my heart and mind Wishing I could see you again Waiting for the day where I can rewind Back to where we met I would confess my love to you And never ever let you go Then do what I wanted to do This is very hard to say But this is how much I want us to be And I want to spend the rest of my life with you Sweetheart will you marry me

Like a feather We are twined togther Like a kite We will take a long flight And see a beautiful sight Like a bird We will glide through the skies And there will be no lies To disguise our eyes And fly from above and below We will bestow our love forevermore LIke the sea There will be no ending and no beginning To the current that moves us Through the troubled waters To the waves that smoothes and soothes us Through the end of our days LIke I saw you from the beginning My love for you will not have an ending

TWO PSECIAL PEOPLE ONE SPECIAL DAY A DREAM TO SHARE ALONG LIFES WAY TWO AS ONE ONE LIFE FROM TWO A SPECAIL DREAM OF LOVE COME TRUE TWO HEARTS UNITED FOREVER TOGETHER

I didn't want to do it, I hate to hear you cry, It's just so hard to deal with When our parents run our lives. We were treated like puppets, And I did what I had to do. Now I'm feeling down and out, And I'm not sure what to do. We want a great life together, And I want to be your wife. This break isn't permanent, I promise you it's not I love you more than anything, And I want to be yours forever. So please believe me when I say: "I do!" on our wedding day.