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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1925. His recent books...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Weddings
Endymion, Book I, [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]
by John Keats
Epithalamium, [Happy Bridegroom]
by Sappho
In Memoriam, Epilogue, [O true and tried, so well and long]
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
A Ditty
by Sir Philip Sidney
A Slice of Wedding Cake
by Robert Graves
A Wedding Toast
by Richard Wilbur
Chateau If
by Peter Gizzi
Epithalamion
by Edmund Spenser
Epithalamium
by Matthew Rohrer
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 116)
by William Shakespeare
Marriage
by William Carlos Williams
Plural Happiness
by David Rivard
Sonnet 8 [Set me where as the sun doth parch the green]
by Petrarch
Tear It Down
by Jack Gilbert
The First Marriage
by Peter Meinke
The Kiss
by Stephen Dunn
The maidens came
by Anonymous
To My Dear and Loving Husband
by Anne Bradstreet
To Sylvia, To Wed
by Robert Herrick
Wedding Poems
When a Woman Loves a Man
by David Lehman
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Magnolia

 
by Gerald Stern

The mayor, in order to marry us, borrowed
a necktie from a lawyer which, on him,
looked stupid and kept his eye on a red pigeon
which somehow got in to coo her disappointment,
if only for the record, though one of the two 
witnesses who kicked the red got only what
she deserved and that was that, except that the 
rain cooed too, but we didn't give a shit
for we had a bed, for God's sake, with two tin buckets
of blossoms waiting for us; and someone there
of Greek persuasion enacted the dancing though somewhat
lickerish and turned to reading the names of the dead
from World War I the other side of the bandstand
but we didn't care nor did we know her name
nor where she came from or what the necktie or what
our love had to do with it anyhow, mostly nothing.









Copyright © 2011 by Gerald Stern. Used with permission of the author.
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