EPITHALAMION
This is the most serious poem I've ever attempted to write – and its evident failure helps explain why I don't try to write poetry any more.
It was written for the wedding of two very dear friends, now the parents of my goddaughter, and I really wanted it to articulate a number of important things I believed (and still believe) quite firmly. Articulate them it does, but unfortunately not well.
EPITHALAMION
For the wedding of Rachel Standing and Malcolm Khanna
20 April 1996
‘In the stars' view, no doubt, these creatures were mere vermin; yet each to itself, and sometimes one to another, was more real than all the stars.’
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker.
The cosmos was created for communion:
It was not good that God should be alone.
God's work articulates a theme of union
In flesh and fire and scaffolding and stone.
A sacrament of mutual reliance,
Dependency unconscious and unknown
Between the members of a grand alliance;
For God creates no creature on its own.
Behind the laws of planetary motion,
Great forces function as a net that's thrown
Between each sphere of mineral and ocean,
A web of gravity which God has sewn.
A universal mutual attraction
Draws on each swirling globe, its whole course known,
Predestined by this cosmic interaction;
For God creates no creature on its own.
And here, the biosphere's reciprocation,
The members of a food chain's tapering cone,
The kinship that, within a termite nation,
Links warrior and worker, queen and drone,
The interchange of cellular osmosis,
The equilibrium of nerve and bone,
All dramatise the sacred symbiosis;
For God creates no creature on its own.
The human race's system of connections,
Their subsidy and rent, exchange and loan,
A city with its myriad cross-sections,
Of bridge and pavement, bus and travel zone,
Devices to extend communications,
The television, internet and 'phone,
Display our species' craving for relations;
For God creates no creature on its own.
And though each human creature's own uniqueness
Ensures that it will never find a clone,
Identical in every strength and weakness,
We nonetheless cannot survive alone.
Community, companionship, compassion
Are all that brings us nearer to God's throne:
And marriage yields all this as well as passion,
For God creates no creature on its own.
© Philip Purser-Hallard 1996.
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