Whoever you are, no matter how lonely...

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely...

seachange

Registrant
Hi everybody, the poet Mary Oliver died this week. Here's a poem of hers I like because it reminds me that even at my most lonely moments, I still have a place in the world.

Wild Geese
By
Mary Oliver

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.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver
 
Oliver was "...sexually abused by her father and neglected by her mother, she spent much of her childhood walking in the woods near her Ohio home, scribbling lines in a notebook and reading from a volume of Walt Whitman poetry she kept in her knapsack. She described nature as a source of solace, beauty and wisdom, perhaps most memorably in her poem Wild Geese."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/mary-oliver-pulitzer-prize-winning-poet-who-found-solace-in-nature-dies-at-83/2019/01/17/1d281eb4-1a74-11e9-88fe-f9f77a3bcb6c_story.html?utm_term=.83145d816943
 
Hi seachange

Thanks for sharing that beautiful poem. Lots of good comes out of our past all we need to do is see it. Thanks you

Take care
Esterio
 
Thank you for sharing this, Seachange. It certainly resonates.
 
Top