Unique Love Poems For Your Nontraditional Wedding Ceremony

Artist and author Shiloh Sophia McCloud said that “poetry adjusts the mind and heart to a different kind of cadence.” Shifting the rhythm of one’s mind and heart is exactly what a ceremony is meant to do. It’s meant to alter our consciousness and provide a state change. In this way poetry and ceremony are sublimely symbiotic. Good poetry can help us move into a more liminal, right brained, timeless and expansive state. I’m always trying to find “poetry gems” that don’t get over used in wedding ceremonies, as well as cliche-free poems, and poems that can be easily adapted so that the god-squeamish among you can feel good about including them in your wedding ceremony. A good reading or poem can not only set the tone, feel and vibe of your ceremony, but it's a great way include a friend or relative in your wedding ceremony as “a reader.” Below are some of my favorite unique love poems for your nontraditional wedding ceremony.

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Song by Tracy K. Smith

I think of your hands all those years ago
Learning to maneuver a pencil, or struggling
To fasten a coat. The hands you’d sit on in class,
The nails you chewed absently. The clumsy authority
With which they’d sail to the air when they knew
You knew the answer. I think of them lying empty
At night, of the fingers wrangling something
From your nose, or buried in the cave of your ear.
All the things they did cautiously, pointedly,
Obedient to the suddenest whim. Their shames.
How they failed. What they won’t forget year after year.
Or now. Resting on the wheel or the edge of your knee.
I am trying to decide what they feel when they wake up
And discover my body is near. Before touch.
Pushing off the ledge of the easy quiet dancing between us.

Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem by Bob Hicok

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of "Old Battersea Bridge."
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
she had to scream out.

Here when I say "I never want to be without you,"
somewhere else I am saying
"I never want to be without you again." And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

This Is A Day Of Celebration by Kamand Kojouri

“This is a day of celebration!
Today, we are divorcing the past
and marrying the present.
Dance,
and you will find {benevolence}
in every room.
Today, we are divorcing resentment
and marrying forgiveness.
Sing,
and {delight} will find you
in every tune.
Today, we are divorcing indifference
and marrying love.
Drink, and play that tambourine
against your thighs.
We have so much celebrating to do!”

*I took the liberty of replacing the word God with the words benevolence and delight, but you can insert whatever words work for you!

Apple Pie Life by Caitlyn Siehl

“Where can we plant the garden?
I’m thinking a lemon tree in the middle,
because, when they’re full and ripe
and I’m just drunk enough,
I’ll look out the window and think
that light can grow on trees.

How do you feel about a pond?
Lily pads and everything.
Maybe some real fish to swim
around in it. I can
paint them, even though I’m
terrible at it.

I want the cottage. I want the
green grass and the tomato plants.
I want the peace in you;
the front porch rocking chair lullaby;
our cricket legs rubbing
together under the covers.

We can’t have it all. I know that,
but humor me. We can’t
have it all, but we can have most of it.
A sliver of it, at best, and that
might be okay.
A lemon tree, definitely.
Write that down.
A bench to kiss you on. A kitchen
with too many windows.

I know you’ve heard this story
before, but that doesn’t make it
any less beautiful.

Come on, put a flower in my hair.
Bake that apple pie recipe that
your mother gave to you.
I don’t care about the dream of it,
just hold the spoon out for me
and let me taste it.

Resignation by Nikki Giovanni

I love you

because the Earth turns round the sun

because the North wind blows north

sometimes

because the Pope is Catholic

and most Rabbis Jewish

because the winters flow into springs

and the air clears after a storm

because only my love for you

despite the charms of gravity

keeps me from falling off this Earth

into another dimension

I love you

because it is the natural order of things

I love you

like the habit I picked up in college

of sleeping through lectures

or saying I’m sorry

when I get stopped for speeding

because I drink a glass of water

in the morning

and chain-smoke cigarettes

all through the day

because I take my coffee Black

and my milk with chocolate

because you keep my feet warm

though my life a mess

I love you

because I don’t want it

any other way

I am helpless

in my love for you

It makes me so happy

to hear you call my name

I am amazed you can resist

locking me in an echo chamber

where your voice reverberates

through the four walls

sending me into spasmatic ecstasy

I love you

because it’s been so good

for so long

that if I didn’t love you

I’d have to be born again

and that is not a theological statement

I am pitiful in my love for you

The Dells tell me Love

is so simple

the thought though of you

sends indescribably delicious multitudinous

thrills throughout and through-in my body

I love you

because no two snowflakes are alike

and it is possible

if you stand tippy-toe

to walk between the raindrops

I love you

because I am afraid of the dark

and can’t sleep in the light

because I rub my eyes

when I wake up in the morning

and find you there

because you with all your magic powers were

determined that

I should love you

because there was nothing for you but that

I would love you

I love you

because you made me

want to love you

more than I love my privacy

my freedom my commitments

and responsibilities

I love you ’cause I changed my life

to love you

because you saw me one Friday

afternoon and decided that I would

love you

I love you I love you I love you