Thursday, June 11, 2009

Bridestones


Scorched-looking, unhewn -- a hill-top chapel.
Actually a crown of outcrop rock --
Earth's heart-bone laid bare.

Crowding congregation of skies.
Tense congregation of hills.
You do nothing casual here.

The wedding stones
Are electrified with whispers.

And marriage is nailed down
By this slender-necked, heavy-headed
Black exclamation mark
of rock.

And you go
With the wreath of weather
The wreath of horizons
The wreath of constellations
Over your shoulders.

And from now on
The sun
Can always touch you
With the shadow of this finger.

From now on
The moon can always lift your skull
On to this perch, to clean it.

2 comments:

Kay Cooke said...

I never knew Ted Hughes wrote such beautiful wedding poetry.
This is so sweet.

Katherine Dolan said...

It's lovely isn't it? This is the one I read at the wedding and amazingly enough, the sun came out exactly at the moment it is mentioned in the poem.