In Celebration

Wedding Poem For Schele and Phil (William and Catherine)

by Bill Holm

A marriage is a risky business these days

Says some old and prudent voice inside.

We don't need children anymore

To keep the family line alive,

Or gather up the hay before the rain.

No law demands respectability

Love can arrive without certificate or cash.

History and experience both make clear

That men and women do not hear

The music of the world in the same key,

Rather rolling dissonances doomed to clash.

So what is left to justify a marriage?

Maybe only the hunch that half the world 

Will ever be present in any room

With just a single pair of eyes to see it.

Whatever is invisible to one

Is to the other an enormous golden lion

Calm and sleeping in the easy chair.

After many years, if things go right

Both lion and emptiness are always there;

The one never true without the other.

But the dark secret of the ones long married,

A pleasure never mentioned to the young,

Is the sweet heat made from two bodies in a bed

Curled together on a winter night

The smell of the other always in the quilt,

The hand set quietly on the other's flank

That carries news from another world

Light years away from the one inside

That you always thought you inhabited alone.

The heat in that hand could melt a stone.

Just this past week as I was in the air over Greenland I was thinking of my husband, home, our life together and thought of the word 'comfort'.  Not in the old-slipper-sense but in the warmth of the above poem.  Of course, the happenings of April 29, 2011 with William marrying Catherine brought this all together in my head.

Some years ago, our girl, Sherilee, said that one should not go to a wedding where you wouldn't want to shed some tears.  These could be tears of joy or sadness, whatever; it seems to me that this wedding was such an occasion.  What we saw at Westminster Abbey was tasteful and elegant.

Let us be happy and wish them well.