52 - In Midsummer a Wedding

In Midsummer a Wedding
By Arnold Kenseth

Now in midsummer a wedding. Attend.
Applaud. The music must be played lightly,
Quietly, at first, like July birdsongs
Hidden in thickets, like sun drying out
The mornings, like grass browsing, dreaming.
Then the words: this man, protecting, serving,
Believing; and this woman, favoring,
Giving, hoping. This family arriving.

Let the music accentuate, arise, float.
Dearly beloved, very dearly beloved,
This act praises and extends us all, as if,
In the afternoon airs, we are all made
Family, as if we are all sun, grass, dreaming.
Now, bells, astound! Ring out aloud, aloft!

In the Hospitals

In the hospitals trussed up to blood;
Or heaving breath so that the pulse can count,
The heart re-beat; or leaving the damp food
Untouched; or stuffed into the oxygen tent:
The sick, sexless as death, are fondled by
Machines, are stroked, pummeled, impaled, and Oh!
Ecstacies in the valley of the shadow,
The morphine murmur under the lost sigh!

And I think how we may die down down down
In the needle haze, in the white mercy
Of nurses, after the seance of X-ray,
Our souls stringed, buttocked in the bleak nightgown;
How dignity, dreaming, passion, faith, all
Will need God to retrieve them as we fall.

Arnold Kenseth is the minister of the South Congregational Church, Amherst, Mass. He is a Lecturer in English at the University of Massachusetts and the author of Sabbaths, Sacraments, and Seasons (Pilgrim Press, 1969), a collection of meditations, prayers, and canticles. He has published poems in the American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review, and Commonweal.