I ran across this poem somewhere awhile back and felt its impact but didn’t have time to digest it, so I emailed it to myself, where it sat in my inbox for about the last two months.
“Wild Geese”
Mary Oliver
from Dream Work, 1986
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Oliver offers lots of bits here to carry away in these times, some 40 years later: the futility of self-flagellation, acceptance of oneself and others, community forged in sorrow, the long arc of nature, you name it. But I think what strikes me most is the bit at the end there: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination . . . announcing your place in the family of things.” Maybe it’s the melancholy kindness of “no matter how lonely” or the idea of found family, whatever it looks like and wherever one looks, that gets me. Or perhaps it’s simply the insistent, incessant calls of the geese, honking away until the message breaks through.
Whatever. Writing more words trying to explain a poem’s impact than the poem itself requires to make that impact further illustrates the virtue of poetry — packing a lot of layers into few words. I was never good at that.
Have a pleasant Thursday, Avocados, and be kind to yourselves and each other. Honk if you love basic human rights and decency!