A tangle of driftwood among the rocks. This stretch of beach in Bandon, Oregon, is one of the most amazing intersections of land and sea I've seen. To photograph it at sunset was a gift.

Two friends recently asked me to read a poem during their wedding ceremony. So I’ve been on the prowl for poems about love, scouring my college copy of Norton’s Anthology of Modern Poetry and back issues of the New Yorker … Read this Tennessee Williams poem in the April-4 issue of the latter, and it has been hanging in my head ever since. I suppose this would be way too dark a choice for most folks on their wedding day, and so the search continues. But, despite its post-apocalyptic nature, I must say that I find “Your Blinded Hand” most beautiful.

Your Blinded Hand

Suppose that
everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your cry and mine were lost among numberless cries
in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that somehow I would find your blinded hand.
Through flames everywhere
consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
I would
find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you’d hear mine and each of us
Would find
the other’s hand.
We know
That it might not be so.
But for this quiet moment, if only for this
Moment,
and against all reason,
let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
that somehow it would be so.
I’d hear your cry, you mine—
And each of us would find a blinded hand.
—Tennessee Williams