(no subject)

Twelve years ago today, I promised Brad to love and cherish him, for better or worse, 'till death do us part. I still haven't perfected that, but I think that will take a lifetime. I'm truly glad I get to do travel this road with HIM though.

This poem was printed on the back of our wedding programs. I had loved it since high school and its appropriateness to our four year long distance relationship, while he went to Westpoint, was obvious. It has been so appropriate some many times in our marriage. And again...

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
by John Donne


AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
His breath goes now and some say No

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Absence, 'cause it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.