The Poem I Scrawled on a Napkin at My Own Wedding
Everyone was dancing. I was writing.
My wedding was in a garden, the kind with fairy lights and a DJ and a hundred people who had come to watch us promise things. I danced the first dance and I made the speech and I cut the cake, and then I went to the bar for a drink and I found a napkin and a pen and I wrote a poem.
I don't know where the urge came from. I had been writing poems for years, for contests, for journals, for the drawer. I had never written one at a wedding, and I had certainly never written one at my own. But the moment was there and the napkin was there and the poem came out the way a poem does when it has been waiting.
It was about my wife's hand, the specific way she held her glass, the ring catching the light. It was about the way she laughed at her own joke before she finished it. It was about the way the garden looked like a place we had invented together, which we had.
I put the napkin in my pocket and I went back to the party and I danced with my wife and I didn't tell her about the poem until we were in the car going home, and she cried, which is the only review I have ever needed.
The napkin is framed now, in our hallway, next to the wedding photo. It is the only thing from the wedding that is not a photograph. It is the thing I made, the thing I wrote, the thing that proves the day was real in a way a photograph cannot.
People ask me why I wrote a poem at my own wedding. The answer is that the wedding was the poem, and the poem was just the evidence. I wrote it because the moment deserved a record that was not a camera. I wrote it because I am a poet, and a poet writes the thing they love, and on that day the thing I loved was standing in a garden in a white dress, holding a glass, laughing at her own joke.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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