Poetry Spotlight: Ute Carson's "Wedding by the Sea"
- Flapper Press Poetry Café
- Jul 2
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 3
By Flapper Press Poetry Café:
The Flapper Press Poetry Café continues to support poets from around the globe and takes great pride in featuring their new work. We continue our new series called Poetry Spotlight in which poets are invited to entice readers with a look into their latest work along with some of the poet's insight, inspirations, and their favorite lines of poetry from their books.
We invite you to submit a poem and a favorite line from the work for the Poetry Spotlight series, or submit your poetry and writing to Flapper Press via our regular Submission Guidelines!
This week, we spotlight the poetry of Ute Carson!
Wedding by the Sea
At your wedding I entrust you with the gifts of the sea,
the waves, the sand, the wind and the seagulls.
Gentle or crashing waves wash ashore,
carrying your lives to and fro.
Listen to the wind, messenger
of your whispered commitments.
Leave your footprints in the sand and
find the conch shell ringing with your echoes.
Seagulls wing in wide circles across the sky,
then return to their nesting grounds,
seizing both the instant and memory.
From Ute Carson:
The last line of the poem "Wedding by the Sea"—"seizing both the instant and memory"—is my favorite. It brings back my inspiration for writing the poem and how a celebration like a wedding closes the circle between the present (the young couple) and the past (parents, grandparents, and extended kin).
I remember our granddaughter, Dylan, as a child chasing seagulls along the beach, and now she is leaving fresh footprints with her husband, Hudson, on sandy paths.
Never before having been at a wedding by the sea, I experienced the elements—waves, sand, wind—and birds on the wing, all around me. Especially the waves, in their coming-and-going, symbolize past and present, instant and memory.
The sea offers special gifts to the newlyweds. I hope that Dylan and Hudson spread their wings like gulls and also flutter back at times to their home ground, the family.
Ute Carson, a German-born writer from youth and an MA graduate in Comparative Literature from the University of Rochester, published her first prose piece in 1977. Colt Tailing, a 2004 novel, was a finalist for the Peter Taylor Book Award. Ute’s story “The Fall” won Outrider Press’s Grand Prize and appeared in its short story and poetry anthology, A Walk through My Garden, in 2007. Her second novel, In Transit, was published in 2008.
Ute’s poetry was televised on the Spoken Word Showcase 2009–2011, Channel Austin. A poetry collection, Just a Few Feathers, was published in 2011. The poem “A Tangled Nest of Moments” placed second in the Eleventh International Poetry Competition 2012. Her chapbook, Folding Washing, was published in 2013, and her collection of poems, My Gift to Life, was nominated for the 2015 Pushcart Prize. Save the Last Kiss, a novella, was published in 2016. Her poetry collection, Reflections, came out in 2018 and In the Blink of an Eye in 2023.
Ute received the Ovidiu-Bektore Literary Award 2018 from the Anticus Multicultural Association in Constanta, Romania. In 2018, she was nominated a second time for the Pushcart Prize by the Plain View Press.
You can find out more about Ute Carson at her website: utecarson.com
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