Wedding Poetry Quotes

I f thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Do not say, I love her for her smile ... her look ... her way Of speaking gently ... for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and, certes, brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day- For these things in themselves, Beloved, may Be changed, or change for thee-and love so wrought, May be unwrought so. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I give you my hand, I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? ~ Walt Whitman

May your marriage bring you all the exquisite excitements a marriage should bring, and may life grant you also patience, tolerance, and understanding. ~ James Dillet Freeman

May you have happiness, and may you find it making one another happy. ~ James Dillet Freeman

For love is sufficient unto love. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. But if to love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: to melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; and to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving; to rest at noon and meditate love's ecstasy; to return home at eventide with gratitude; and then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Ave Maria
BY FRANK O'HARA
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
they won't hate you
they won't criticize you they won't know
they'll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

they may even be grateful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn't upset the peaceful home
they will know where candy bars come from
and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
they won't know the difference
and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy
and they'll have been truly entertained either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room
hating you
prematurely since you won't have done anything horribly mean yet
except keeping them from the darker joys
it's unforgivable the latter
so don't blame me if you won't take this advice
and ~ Frank O'Hara

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. ~ Samuel Johnson

A revolution in the eyes of man carries purpose.
A revolution in the eyes of the awakened carries bliss. ~ Sal Martinez

Ninth Floor

she ran across the parquet slipped the flokati mat
crashed the window

no

she stood at the window prism looked up at sky bruise night
spread her

no

she tilted dived swanning spinning
tip-toed ink air broke fingers first

no

she climbed the small gap the window gave
hung her finger joints clotted the view with frightened breath
fell ligament torn and sorry

no

she wandered to the glass hatch to watch tranquilised lights sputtering
leaned too hard fell faster than a bottle of Jack

no

this is how it was:

drunk screaming she crashed the parquet with grief
roared the ungiving window frames which gave

she spangled spaghetti-like ribbon-voiced
street lights crashed on her

no.

She did nothing. ~ Karin Schimke

Two Obligations [10w]
We've got two obligations in this world:
Love and Poetry. ~ Beryl Dov

Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music. ~ Nick Hornby

My world melts, when you are next to me
And I don't care who is next to me. ~ Luffina Lourduraj

Poets have recently been misappropriating words in order to describe poetry as an economy that, outside the poem itself, has little to do with the dominance of the market but nearly everything to do with the dominance of the state. Across the United States poets have turned to economic models from a basic need to articulatea value for a livelihood dedicated, in whole or in part, to the poetic process. Their wages cannot, of course, be determined in the bear market for free verse.Popular neglect makes it easy for poets to assume that poetry is a gift and not a commodity. Too often they ignore the state's role as mediator between gift and market through the system of grants and copyright. ~ Keneth Warren

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say. ~ Compay Segundo

Such a nasty bruise," he says, staring straight into my eyes. I am stunned he can see it. Delicate to the touch and tender on every side, the bruise is deeper than days. My hand automatically moves to my chest.

Science taught me with valid assurance that my heart was fixed in my rib cage, but life has since shown me otherwise. My heart in fact dangles from a tangle of strings. The ends are grasped tight by numerous people who yank and release, having caused many painful bruises over time. I cry because they are invisible to most.

"Such a nasty bruise," he repeats, tugging on my poor heart.

His kind eyes fall away from mine as I feel a squeeze on my arm. He twists it enough to show me a small, round patch of purple surrounded by a sickly yellowish corona.

"Oh. My elbow." I let the air exhale from my lungs. Another bruise forms where my heart has hit the floor. It is jerked up again.

"Can I do anything for you?" I see in his eyes the mirror image of a finger - his finger - wrapped in one of the dangling strings. He tugs and I feel it.

"No," I reply to his question. But it is a lie. There is something he could do, along with all who grasp a portion of the web entangling my heart. I wish they would mercifully let go. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

There's nothing more useless in the world than a groom just before the wedding. ~ Terry Pratchett

everybody loves me because i'm good at making people feel good. i'm good at making people feel good because i have had a lot of practice on myself ~ Sabrina Benaim

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.
If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker.
If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
And that's who forms our poetics. ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

I've reached the vanishing point
without you.
Here my heartache begins with your pain
trying to find an unborn start
in this fatal disappearance

From the poem 'Me with the Vanishing Point ~ Munia Khan

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?"
Macbeth ~ William Shakespeare

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets - Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included - breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. ...
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?
...
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild.
...
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres. ~ Philip Larkin

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul? ~ J.M. Coetzee

There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do. ~ Dave Grohl

After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I'd experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she'd handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world. ~ Paul Kalanithi

I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the
incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go
to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among
phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty
enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all,
yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so
unspeakably lonely. ~ Virginia Woolf

Banal sexism aside,
I find myself tempted

to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge
for all that life withheld from Emily.
But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought. ~ Anne Carson

In my loneliness…I found you
In my darkness... I found you
In my insanity…. I found you
In the chaos of the world... you and I found love
But you and I will always remain an unfinished story! ~ Avijeet Das

Poets are sitting in my kitchen.
Why do these poets lie?
Why do children get children and
Did you hear what it said? ~ Anne Sexton

And everyone wants to read the poem
we're afraid to write. ~ Kelli Russell Agodon

Poetry is given to the poet. I don't think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Some poems are written great, some poems are written swell. But then there are poems that could win a prize in Hell. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Those green irises were like gentle pools of brilliant meadows of sage and green-envy coneflowers swaying in a warm breeze.
HOLY fuck. What the hell sort of poetry was that dribbling out of my twisted brain? ~ Christine Zolendz

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity. ~ Alfred De Vigny

Words are so strong and I am so timid - my soul ignores warnings and I end up covered with your paint ... ~ John Geddes

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day. ~ Andrew Marvell

I'm a terribly irresponsible eater - I love soft-boiled eggs and chocolate. I never met a chocolate I could not eat. ~ Danielle Steel

your hand
touching mine.
this is how
galaxies
collide. ~ Sanober Khan

A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn't have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words. ~ Patricia Lockwood

Evening Primrose

When once the sun sinks in the west,
And dewdrops pearl the evening's breast;
Almost as pale as moonbeams are,
Or its companionable star,
The evening primrose opes anew
Its delicate blossoms to the dew;
And, hermit-like, shunning the light,
Wastes its fair bloom upon the night,
Who, blindfold to its fond caresses,
Knows not the beauty it possesses;
Thus it blooms on while night is by;
When day looks out with open eye,
Bashed at the gaze it cannot shun,
It faints and withers and is gone. ~ John Clare

I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles. ~ Isabel Allende

Finally, what I want from poetry is akin to what Flaubert wanted from novels. He thought they should make us dream. I want a poem, through its precisions and accuracies, to make me remember what I know, or what I might have known if I hadn't been constrained by convention or habit. ~ Stephen Dunn

You know better than I," he said, "that all courts-martial are farces and that you're really paying for the crimes of
other people, because this time we're going to win the war at any price. Wouldn't you have done the same in my place?"
General Moncada got up to clean his thick horn-rimmed glasses on his shirttail. "Probably," he said. "But what
worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on
the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on "is that out of so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness." He took off his wedding ring and the medal of the Virgin of Help and put them alongside his glasses and watch.
"At this rate," he concluded, "you'll not only be the most despotic and bloody dictator in our history, but you'll shoot
my dear friend Ursula in an attempt to pacify your conscience. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In this place on my own
The sea outside wraps this house of stone
Winter hums a chilly winter tune
Brushing through the stacks of sand dunes ~ Virginia O'Malley

I have to give you your wedding present," Marlboro Man said before I could ask where we were going. "I can't wait a month before I give it to you."
Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. "But…," I stammered. "I haven't gotten yours yet."
Marlboro Man clasped my hand, continuing to look forward at the road. "Yes you have," he said, bringing my hand to his lips and turning me to a pool of melted butter right in his big Ford truck. ~ Ree Drummond

To toil, to think, to long, to grieve,
Is such my future fate?
The morn was dreary, must the eve
Be also desolate? ~ Charlotte Bronte

I love, therefore I am. ~ Robert Graves

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of
please forgive me
wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. ~ Anne Lamott

The recurring lovesickness of my teenage years often brought debilitating side effects, the worst of these being a compulsion to write Christian poetry. ~ Matthew Pierce

He eyed me curiously, his eyes fluttering over my breasts, and I swallowed, knowing he was thinking things he shouldn't. His tongue snuck between his lips and lightly darted to moisten them. I heard what sounded like a moan before he moved his left hand from under the table. He tried to rest his palm on my resting hand but I inched away. I looked at his hand, and noticed the shading of where his wedding ring used to go ... My mind caught up - used to? Where was it? ~ Mercy Cortez

In the shadow of the rocks my wildness stays awake,
ready to fly at the slightest whisper, at approaching steps...

I have a door to all four winds.
I have a golden door to the east – for love that never comes,
I have a door for day and another for sadness,
I have a door for death – that one is always open. ~ Edith Sodergran

Our Beasts and our Thieves and our Chattels
Have weight for good or for ill;
But the Poor are only His image,
His presence, His word, His will; -
And so Lazarus lies at our doorstep
And Dives neglects him still. ~ Adelaide Anne Procter

Mountains clothed in snow
Robed in white against blue skies
Mirrored in the lake. ~ Timothy Salter