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According to my dad, wedding poems are quite a tradition in his family. Wedding invitation poems, poems read during during the bridal shower, the wedding dinner, and the actual wedding ceremony, and many other examples of wedding poetry go back generations in his family. After all, many of them are wordsmiths. Within my father's family line, there are literally dozens of fairly well-known poets and authors. That these people can compose a wedding poem is no surprise to anyone who has read their works. They are some pretty talented people.
When it was time for me to get married, however, I sort of shrugged when confronted with the idea of wedding poems. I wasn't particularly interested. To tell you the truth, I was a little bit insecure. My poetry wasn't bad, but compared to some of the poems that had come out of my father's family, it wasn't very good either. I knew that I wasn't a talented writer, and had grown accustomed to that fact, but even so it felt like a shame to have to showcase my mediocre wedding poem in front of hundreds of guests.
Nonetheless, I knew that it was important to my father. Let's face it – weddings are as much for the parents as they are for the people getting married. A wedding poem was something that was expected of me, and I wanted to do my dad proud. I took a lot of time to come up with the perfect poetry. As a matter of fact, it took me months. I thought about wedding poems, looked at wedding poetry on line, bought a few collections of poetry, and basically found inspiration whenever I could. I went through dozens and dozens of drafts, but I finally came up with something that I really liked.
Although I wanted to show my wedding poems to my dad ahead of time, I decided to keep them secret. This was the traditional way of doing it, after all. When it came time to read my poem in front of the guests, I got very nervous. It took me a moment, but I steadied myself and got ready to read. When I was finally finished, there was a hush over the room. Then people applauded. Apparently, even average writers can come up with good wedding poems If they put enough work into it. The key is sincerity and good taste. I have both of those qualities in abundance.
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