So as some of you may know, my sister is getting married in a few weeks. For the ceremony, she and her fiancé wanted to do a couple of readings, and she asked me to help her find one. So we searched around and found some good candidates, but then she thought, knowing that I dabble in writing, that it might be cool to have me try and write something, and we’d keep her final 3rd party provider (Touched by an Angel by Maya Angelou) as an understudy if I wasn’t able to come up with something satisfactory; creativity on demand does not always work well, you understand.

Now, I hadn’t ever written a love poem before, and hadn’t, to be frank, historically been a big fan of the genre; the subject is pretty trite, and I have read very few love poems that I actually like. But where there’s a need…Anyway, I came up with a couple of poems that, after some editing, I am pretty happy with, and she ended up picking one of them. For your reading pleasure (?), I’ve posted them here. First, the runner-up:

Two together: a song of devotion

We came up out of the dark
and found the world free of shadow
found joy where we had not imagined a lack

We exorcized the ghosts of memory
shed the legacy of our past sorrow
and armed ourselves with conviction

Travelers both, we two
now unburdened, now prepared
for the terrain of our lives together

Our ideas of ourselves,
half-formed and shapeless,
only together are made whole
made sharp
made strong

Disbelieving the good fortune
of this chance-met circumstance,
this coincidence of moon and stars,
we come to the truth,
that we are better together than apart.

Though it demands a heavy price
love is the sweetest sacrifice we can make.
This is my pledge:
This is the ink of my love and my loyalty,
tattooed here across my heart,
indelible.

Credit where it’s due: one of the lines in the poem is a paraphrase of a snippet of a poem I saw on TV. I’d like to credit it more fully, but it was a poem written by a fictional character on a TV show, so I guess I have to thank whoever was the poem writer on the “Best Friends” episode of Cold Case:

I came up out of the dark without you
and every day since has been in shadow

Another line, my favorite, is a paraphrase of some song lyrics (really, it’s a poem)—from Walking Through the Empty Age by Chris Mosdell:

I dip my hands into this darkness
This is the ink of all our lifetimes
Here in this world of utter silence
Let the stones speak to me

Tattooed here across my skin, “I will live”
Like a rose that grows from the wreckage
Blood red, beautiful
As the storms all around me are now breathless

Beautiful, ain’t it? Brings a tear to my eye. No, really. Anyway, moving on. Here is the winner:

Influence

It is tempting to consign love
to the banality of daily existence
another of the petty magics of our lifetimes
just, or mere, or only
another meaningless, overused word

But let it come to us
and even the air is sweeter
every instant touched by fate
every breath invested with meaning

Flushed with the happy circumstances of our meetings
the serendipitous confluence of our paths
we dare to believe
that we should be so fortunate
to have found our complements in each other,
that the burgeoning excesses of others
could fill the lack in ourselves
that we could deserve these wondrous gifts
love gives us:
connection where there was a void
hope where there was despair
courage where there was fear
self-sacrifice where there was conceit

Love makes angels of us all,
and only in its arms are we free to fly.