A quick word from Emma: I just wanted to give a little introduction to this guest post.  We have been following Anna and the Ring for some weeks now.  Anna is getting married and has her blog is fantastic.  She is an amazing writer and her posts are full of original content and beautiful images.  We are so very pleased that she has written a guest post for us!   Here she is…

So when the lovely Emma said I could write a guest post for Electric Wedding I got rather excited! Oh what to write? What do you fabulous ladies want to read about? Hmm, well I’m a bride too so I guess I wanted to write about something that has been troubling me! At this moment in time it is thinking about wedding readings. For a girl whose brain is one of a scientist rather than a wordsmith this has been a long road with no appreciable end in sight!

Indeed, I cannot seem to get enough of reading different texts and verses.  I find myself buying obscure old second hand books in the hope of finding a gem. If you have ever tussled over a book long out of print with someone on eBay I imagine it was me! We are not having a religious ceremony so no ubiquitous Corinthians or Romans for us. Furthermore I am not interested in hearing my closest family read from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or an anthology of Shakespeare. It’s just not very us. There is nothing wrong with such readings it is just they are rather too predictable. I do pride myself on being slightly unpredictable! I recall the scene in Wedding Crashers where they place bets upon which verse is to be read. (I sort of love that film, do not judge me harshly!)

We very much want my little brother to speak but he is yet to find love (being a boy having fun!) and so it seems incredibly weird to have he speak of love. Oh the fine line of finding a reading without it being wildly inappropriate. I would be happy with slightly inappropriate but if he suggests the opening lines of Terminator 2 one more time!* Grr. Bless his youthful exuberance. Yet this is a passing issue in comparison to vows.  However* *that is another post for another day! Although in my linguistic travels I have come across a few beauties.

The following is one of my favourites. It just seems to say what I want to say. If you have any trouble finding beautiful words for your service you should look no further than the wondrous Pablo Neruda. His work evokes such heartfelt emotions. Indeed I am rather worried that his work will become boringly mainstream and lose it magically quality. Whilst most of his work has been translated from the original Spanish I find that the words have lost little meaning and are amply able to bring me to tears. Is that not what poetry is all about?

What do you think? Sit back and enjoy. I would love to hear your ideas for your readings.

Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist,
nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

*3 billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines. The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.

Tags: Anna and the Ring

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