The inclusion of poems in your ceremony can add meaning. There is a wealth of poetry available on the internet. Below we list a few of the all time favourites.
When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even of the most loving and well assorted. A happy wedlock is a long falling in love. Young persons think love belongs only to the brown-haired and crimson-cheeked. So it does for its beginning. But the golden marriage is a part of love which the Bridal day knows nothing of…
Such a large and sweet fruit is a complete marriage that it needs a long summer to ripen in, and then a long winter to mellow and season it. But a really happy marriage of love and judgement between a noble man and woman is one of the things so very handsome that if the sun were, as the Greek poets fabled, a God, he might stop the world and hold it still now and then in order to look all day long on some example thereof, and feast his eyes on such a spectacle.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Fair dinkum love isn’t about bringing in a dozen red roses
It’s about bringing in the washing.
It’s not about standing next to your partner
because they look good on your arm
It’s about standing by them even when they look foolish.
Fair dinkum love isn’t about stiff posture and smart clothes
It’s about wrestling on the couch in your tracksuit.
It’s not about oysters and candle-lit dinners
It’s about bringing home Chinese when your partner’s had a busy day.
Fair dinkum love isn’t about exciting getaways and fancy resorts
It’s about being totally content sleeping-in together at home.
It’s not about gym memberships and facelifts
It’s about growing old and fat together.
Fair dinkum love is not about romance or image or success.
Fair dinkum love is about two average people adoring and accepting each other for who they are.
– Kim Cockerell
We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong.
Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. It isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems – the ones that make you truly who you are – that you’re ready to find a life-long mate.
Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person – someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, “This is the problem I want to have.”
– Andrew Boyd
You are the star of each night,
You are the brightness of every morning,
You are the story of each guest,
You are the report of every land.
No evil shall befall you, on hill nor bank,
In field or valley, on mountain or in glen.
Neither above, nor below, neither in sea,
Nor on shore, in skies above,
Nor in the depths.
You are the kernel of my heart,
You are the face of my sun,
You are the harp of my music,
You are the crown of my company
– Anon.
