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  1. Weddings

Epithalamium

October 20, 2007 Dear Lynn, I haven’t met you yet, and yet,  Because of your groom’s frank and free oblations  In sonnet sequences or while we drink,In permanent print or on the internet,  I write to share my cheerful approbations  For what I cannot know but may still . . . . Continue Reading »

Epithalamion

We mark the days that tell us who we are, staccato days that give our lives their form, this wedding day, when happy hearts and warm are joined beneath July’s auspicious star. Count them, the golden days of greatest joy holding the hope of children yet unborn and, knowing there will be days . . . . Continue Reading »

Pelicans at Nags Head

Bumbling, ungainly, sag-chinned, laughable: on land, the pelicans concede their natures. Hugging the sand, one tries to hide his features, long neck scrunched into shoulders, abashed bill well down. Airborne, they’re different: choreographed. Baroque danseurs, their slow-beat wing pavane impends . . . . Continue Reading »

Same-Self Marriage

It’s only a trickle, not yet a trend, but it is out there, and it has a name: sologamy. Sologamy is the marriage of someone to one’s own self—the his- or herness of it is not relevant, although it seems to be mostly women who are doing it. Apparently Linda Baker was the first person to marry herself back in December 1993. Others have followed suit, including Sara Sharpe, who wrote about her self-marriage in A Dress, A Ring, Promises to Self. And there’s Nadine Schweigert, a 36-year-old-woman from Fargo, North Dakota, who was interviewed by Anderson Cooper after marrying herself in front of some forty of her closest friends. “I, Nadine,” she said to herself, “promise to enjoy inhabiting my own life and to relish a lifelong love affair with my beautiful self.” Continue Reading »

?Pope Francis and Weddings

The New York Times titled its article, “In Weddings, Pope Looks Past Tradition.” The Wall Street Journal announced that the pope’s presiding over twenty weddings at St. Peter’s on Sunday indicates his desire for a more “open and inclusive church.” CBS News called the mass ceremony “progressive.” 
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