How British Poet Greta Bellamacina Shapes Words for Life, Love, and Vows

Greta Bellamacina moves through the world like a line of poetry; dreamy, deliberate, and softly defiant. “I like to write in the mornings,” she says. “Nothing good comes to me after lunchtime. I tend to dream more throughout the rest of the day. I like to let the words settle like paint, then I come back to them later and mess them up.”

In the afternoons, she’s on her feet. “I like to be moving around. Or just walking; walking is my meditation.” There’s a quiet physicality to her rhythm, a need to stay in motion, to keep the ideas breathing.

The ethereal actress, model and poet who salutes her followers with the words “welcome back to the world of feelings” recently released her latest poetry collection: Who Will Make The Fire. Written mostly on train rides between the countryside in Kent (where she now lives) and the city of London. “I was feeling very inspired by the cycles of nature,” she says. “But it was also daunting. This is my first time living in the countryside. The first few winters felt haunted; darkness I’d never experienced before, relentless weather. But then one day, the first flower spotlights the wasteland, and all is settled for a second.”

Waiting for Godot

She also just starred in Things and Other Things, a cinematic poem of a film shot in Italy with acclaimed theatre director Riccardo Vannuccini. The film unfolds with the symbolic narrative of a poem. “It’s a Waiting for Godot-esque story,” Bellamacina says, where language fades and movement (subtle, surreal, and often childlike) becomes its own form of communication.

Costume plays a vital role. Longtime collaborator Pierpaolo Piccioli, with whom Bellamacina first worked in 2019 when he wove her poetry into his Valentino A/W collection, designed a bespoke gown for the film. “Pierpaolo’s clothes are made for cinema,” she muses. “They transcend time. They make you believe beauty can exist all around, even in a broken time.”

Shot in abandoned locations across Tuscany (an empty theme park, a forgotten hospital, a shuttered school) the film’s melancholic backdrop gives the dress a sense of displacement and wonder. “Like when children play dress-up; they don’t need context to believe in beauty.”

“We wrote our vows together and made up the ceremony with the trees as our witnesses. Our words shared the same phrases but changed slightly each time. Sort of like a song, sort of like a chant, sort of like a Surrealist poem, sort of like two sides of the heart.”

Words Like Vows, Vows Like Poems

Beauty, a haunted kind of beauty, is at the core of everything Bellamacina writes. It is there in her poems, in her images, in the words she chooses to speak aloud. And perhaps nowhere more intimately than in the vows she wrote for her own wedding, now eight years ago. Reminiscing, the artist didn’t want a voice between her and her lover. No priest, no script, no performance. Just the two of them; standing beneath the Dartmoor trees (a national park in southern Devon, South West England), exchanging vows they wrote together as a mirrored poem.

“We decided to marry each other without a celebrant,” she says. “We wrote our vows together and made up the ceremony with the trees as our witnesses. Our words shared the same phrases but changed slightly each time. Sort of like a song, sort of like a chant, sort of like a Surrealist poem, sort of like two sides of the heart.”

Below, the artist shares her poetic lens on writing vows – whether for a ceremony, a note, or simply to understand what your heart wants to say.

1. Start with an image, or a feeling that won’t leave you

“I often begin with an image. Something I’ve been holding onto for a long time. A memory etched in my mind that just won’t go away. Then I try to work out why. Why do some images hold more emotion than others?” Greta suggests tuning into what interrupts you; those fragments that haunt or soften your mind. “Memories are like hauntings, in a way.”

2. Let the form find itself

“If someone feels overwhelmed by writing their own vows, I’d say: don’t worry about structure. Just begin. Listen to a song that evokes something personal. Free-write. Let the pen dictate. The unexpected phrases are often the most honest.” And when you’re ready to edit, remember: “The feeling is the form.”

3. Embrace rhythm, and repetition

“I like repetition,” she says. “There’s something holy and reassuring about it. It mirrors the human experience. We wake, we live, we sleep, we live, we wake… But if you were to speed up time, you might see all the small changes. Playing with repetition and finding those small shifts is important.” Consider using repeated lines that echo or evolve throughout – like a heartbeat, like a promise.

“I often begin with an image. Something I’ve been holding onto for a long time. A memory etched in my mind that just won’t go away.”

“If someone feels overwhelmed by writing their own vows, I’d say: don’t worry about structure. Just begin. Listen to a song that evokes something personal. Free-write. Let the pen dictate. The unexpected phrases are often the most honest.”

“I like repetition. There’s something holy and reassuring about it. It mirrors the human experience. We wake, we live, we sleep, we live, we wake… But if you were to speed up time, you might see all the small changes. Playing with repetition and finding those small shifts is important. Consider using repeated lines that echo or evolve throughout — like a heartbeat, like a promise.”

4. Say what only you can say

“The beauty of poetry is that you can be profound in a single line,” Greta says. “The poem doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you. That’s important. Because a poem is a way of sharing a feeling through a broken map. The stranger and more heartfelt the better.” This applies to vows, too: the truest ones often sound like no one else’s.

5. Be brief, if that’s all it takes

How long should vows be? “The length is less important than the feeling,” she says. “You can say everything in a few words, if they’re the right ones.”

6. Use a memory, offer a promise

While she resists prescriptive formats, Greta gently suggests the emotional arc that’s always stayed with her: “You might begin with a memory. And end with a quiet promise.”

7. Let nature help you say it

Whether it’s walking in the woods or observing the curl of a flower petal, Greta finds language in the natural world. “I’ve always looked at flowers a little too long,” she admits. “The eyelids of flowers, the necks of flowers, the death of flowers, and their left seeds.”

These tiny symbols, and the cycles they represent, can hold more than we realize.

8. Don’t worry about sounding perfect — aim for feeling true

If you’re stuck, try thinking of vows not as speeches, but as quiet, intentional offerings. “I sometimes think of my writing like film photography,” she says. “It’s a broken collection of memories that hold something meaningful to me. They live in the present but come from a different time.”

9. And if you need a line to carry in your pocket…

“In the spirit of weddings I love this description of the winter trees by Sylvia Plath, where she describes the trees as a series of weddings,” shares Greta:

“The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing.
Memories growing, ring on ring,
A series of weddings”.

To see more of Greta Bellamacina’s work, visit her Instagram.