As events played out recently, I had the sweet fortune of being the celebrant for a very private exchange of marriage vows (yes, y’all read that right ! 🙂) It was for a lovely couple, very good friends we’ve known for many years. I also had the privilege of solemnising a unity candle ceremony, as well as being a witness later in the presence of an officiant, authorised to lawfully seal the union. It has been a most wonderful experience, in these grey and hazy times.

Later, I wrote a poem to mark the occasion, a tribute to their nomadic lives as they work for the betterment of children’s lives the word over. I tried to capture what it means to be a couple, while being part of the United Nations, separated often by geography and time, which will resonate with those that are involved in long distance relationships. It is a poem on how love sustains across borders, time zones, long separations, days, months, years… a few aspects of the story are deeply personal to our friends, the rest being poetic license. I’ve tried to add a touch of their organic world and weave in some of the countries they have lived in … I have experimented with the first person narrative style which in this poem, stands for either of the couple speaking to the other.

The theme song of this intimate ceremony was an enchanting instrumental based on Verve’s classic bitter sweet symphony. I have italicized what I borrowed from the song. There’s also a bit of Bizet’s Carmen at the end, which too has special significance.

The last month has been a whirlwind of sorts and when beautiful things happen around you seamlessly, like a river flow or you yield to the river perhaps, then surely, life is blessed.

The poem has been arranged to appear like a wave (best viewed on a large screen or tablet), given that a precious friendship was seeded in the aftermath of a Tsunami.

        
        Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, that's life..  
      
      bloat of whale song, birdsong, petulant -

    the rattle of tanks and thunder,

   giant waves cascading cymbals on shores

  for heartbeats lost 

   in native lands.

    I'll take you down the only road 

     I've ever been down. 

      You know the one 

       that takes you to the places 

          where all the veins meet ..

                  those hopeful rivers 

                       merging sinuous sentiment

                  into the shapelessness of ocean 

             s   p   a   c   e    beneath the breast, 

      a vast rhythmic rise 

 in tidal moons,  waves licking shores 

  now awash in stories loosely anchored

    to transient shoals, 

          then exasperated,

              sedimenting the ocean floor 

                 in breezy metaphors of flying fish, 

               fish like mammals breathing our air ......

             The reef edge was always steeply laced

           in a filigree of the statuesque -

       Coral corralling within aragonite bridal veil, 

 feelings in free d

                             i

                              v

                                e

Rewind to retrospect:

     Small Giant Clams 

         netted and harboured secrets 

           to the future we never dreamed of 

              except in stories that read as life itself, 

               long after the deed is done. 

             Washed ashore briefly on coral sands, 

         we were a tsunami of affections 

   seeking anchorage to archipelagic sentiment, 

 creating little islands of purpose, 

islands of recreation, 

 sand banks of spirituality, floating islands, 

   floating plankton, floating algae, swimming 

     in the shallows like the time 

       I almost drowned      

         in fever 

           and pulled you to seaweed depths 

             but you came up gasping for air, 

               to a soul clarity,                                

                  we both did ..

                  Time flew, like I flew, like a raven 

             off the ark, to the ruins 

        of an ancient fairy tale, 

    where salt water couldn't drown 

a covenant struck in a yielding heart, 

the only living thing which I thought existed 

    in the semi arid of those lifeless blunders 

         that overstay their welcome on the dunes. 

             The stars of the desert as brilliantly 

                  luminous as our eyes, blinking binaries

                      when I looked for you in asterisms and you 

                         looked to me 

                                                and we 
 
                               found ourselves                        

                                     under a red blanket. 

                                          You came with a sprig in your beak 

                                                to drier sands, 
                         
                                                    where we etched

                                                        the holy books of faith

                                                           to our own religion 

                                                              under a blanketing sentiment ..

                                                            feelings relocated, landlocked, 

                                                        then clarified in three layers of lake 

                                                  amid a thousand cichlid kisses 

                                        darting under a blazing fire. 

                               Those sun burnished hearts 

                   south of the equator strangely rhyme

        the same, while venous blood flow upwards, 

  downwards and across 

that expansive meter 

    of grassland, where we fostered 

        the lives of children like it were 

           a spiritual mandate. 

               Those leached affections pooled 

                    into a reservoir of love, a lake 

                         that turned clear as crystal     

                              in that turbid genesis ..

                                  the celestial was most surreal           

                                      when I woke one day to the milky way 

                                          obscured by the million lights 

                                             along a river, 

                                         dazzling a grid of avenues and streets 

                               and I know that to this layered night 

                 was hitched the hem of your sunrise 

       and your cape of night stars 

the one that would course through time 

   to find me with stories 

     etched in constellations, 

         of warlords and poppy fields 

            where the only rebel was the heart 

                for it floundered on land carpeted 

                    in the brightest, sometimes the whitest 

                        snow, ravaged by battle tanks, redeemed 

                             by roses along savage roads 

                                 and land as soft as noni 

                              and my heart yearned 

                    under the same sky,             

              yours and mine, 

      separated simply 

 by the geography of employment. 

   It takes a while to find one's feet 

         in the clayey soil of mangroves 

             skirting the bay where tigers 

                 tread to glide and humans barely stand, 

                       for the passage of time 

                             has been cobbled in death 

                                  trod by the advancing cavalry of years 

                            of those we knew who never grew any younger 

                        and now, will never grow older, 

               but we had each other, 

       our days vivisected 

 to a standard operating procedure,    

so we thought, zooming through 

  the virtual multiverse         

     which sagely conspired to confine

       breath to national pleura ..

          deaf to the ventilating heart, 

              blind to the diminishing 'soul'?

          Are human lives as poetic as mangroves -

      inhaling through aerial roots ?

  Or a stone cold reclining Buddha - 

  His holy feet rubbed in gold leaf 

     having little use for a Midas touch? 

        Illusions of habitat, these ..

           Reality is solely etched in our partings, 

              our separations, our prolonged confinements. 

                Our measured lives

                    reluctantly succumbed 

                        to the everyplace invisible 

                           punctuating our complacency, 

                              like a sardonic smile 

                                  lurking without a body, 

                                      seeking host. 

                                        The world at its loudest SOS 

                                     made every moment a past tense, 

                              as crepuscular as terse beliefs 

                      situating ambition in twilight, that future we all desire

               but never really have.  So we 

    defied time,  shredded tense 

   planned a grand escape, to elope 

      with the moment itself. 

         They told us that 

               love ..     is a bohemian child and 

                   he never, never knew a law, 

                      but strangely, love's law 

                         kindled this union as certain as a flame        

                     lights another and coruscates the void.

       That's,  the only road we know,     

the tangible of bright, the space w i t h i n,

   limitless as the horizon on a globe

       I'll take you down

          the only road I've ever been down. 

              You know the one that takes you 

                  to the places 

                        where all the veins meet ..