This Friday’s poem was chosen because as the earlier post tells, today friends are being married and it will be the first of five weddings we’re attending in three different countries over the next couple of months.
Wedding Song by Jenny Bornholdt is from My Heart Goes Swimming edited by Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O’Brien, published by Godwit.
Wedding Song
Now you are married
Try to love the world
As much as you love
Each other. Greet it as your husband,
Wife. Love it with all your
Might as you sleep
Breathing against its back.
Love the world, when late at night,
You come home to find snails
Stuck to the side of the house
Like decoration.
Love your neighbours.
The red berries on their trampoline
Their green wheelbarrow.
Love the man walking on
Water, the man up a
mast. Love the light moving
across the Island Princess.
Love your grandmother when she tells you
Her hair is three-quarters ‘café au lait’.
Try to love the world, even when you discover
there is no such thing as The Author
any more.
Love the world, praise
God, even, when your aerobics instructor
is silent.
Try very hard to love
your mailman, even though her regularly
delivers you Benidicto Clemente’s mail.
Love the weta you find on the path,
injured by alteration.
Love the tired men, the burnt
house, the handlebars of light
on the ceiling.
Love the man on the bus who says
it all amounts to a fishing rod
or a lightbulb.
Love the world of the garden.
The keyhole of bright green grass
Where the stubborn palm
used to be,
bees so drunk on ginger flowers
that they think the hose water
is rain your hair tangled in
heartsease.
Love the way,
when you come inside,
insects find their way out
from the temporary rooms of
your clothes.
– Jenny Bornholdt –
