Category: Poetry

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

I find this poem to be deeply comforting, inspiring and liberating. It addresses the human instinctual need to belong. Our separation from nature and from one another is an illusion fed to us by superficial society and the modern world where physical boundaries as well as narrow social criteria define, judge and restrict our sense of being. This unnatural fabrication of separateness has resulted in devastating feelings of alienation and loneliness.

In a higher reality, we, each and all, belong with one another and in creation. Here, the wild geese call to us to let our imagination soar beyond the low-grade, cliché understanding of civilized society to claim our rightful space in the created world.

Poem’s source: Poet Seers » Wild Geese

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.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

This is one of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver (1935-2019), an American Pulitzer Prize winning poet. In The Summer Day, she guides us to notice some of the smallest details in nature while asking us the biggest, deepest and most important questions concerning our existence. Here, the micro and macro visions of life blend perfectly.

This poem came from the Library of Congress website: The Summer Day | Library of Congress

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

To Walk Together

This poem is by D who gave it to me recently. It was a surprise because he had not written me poems for a long while.

It's so good
to walk together.
Even as trouble falls down -
at times like light rain,
and others like a torrent - 
We can keep walking.
And that rain we are meant
to capture and use,
for future gardens.
Because there will be clarity
in the sky, brightness on our faces,
and things will grow and thrive again.

A love poem

I wrote this for my husband, David, who has been with me through thick and thin for over 25 years. Our friendship and marriage are the best things that have happened to me in my adult life.

I may not know what love is
A philosopher calls it "friendship set to music"
A writer calls it "a winged bird" that soars
I am contemplating my own definition of this eternally elusive but also the most beautiful thing.
I know that my admiration for you is boundless,
that my respect for you profound.
I have had the front-row seat to witnessing how much you have cared, worked and sacrificed for me, us and humanity.
Oh, how I wish for only good things for us!
I wish that we would always walk together through pleasant meadows filled with pretty wildflowers.
I wish that we would always sail together on calm sea with favorable wind.
I wish that we would always exist in the light.
Alas, it is not so, my love!
At times, our love is like a delicate flower trying to survive in a rocky terrain in hellish weather that bends to destroy every living thing,
or like a fragile small bird struggling to find food in the dead of winter,
or like a stumbling creature in such despairing darkness that he sees naught and has naught to hold on to.
Sorry that I have focused too much on the darkness,
that I have dwelled too long in my own pains
To show you how deeply I care about you and all your struggles, about us, our home and our family.
To show you that I am still your girl
I'm still that girl that danced with you on that small piece of newspaper in Chukamol,
who chooses to stay every single time she feels like running away.
I know, by nature, I'm not patient,
but I cannot help how I am made.
I am still that girl who walked with you by the sea on our first date.
I have always cared about you and all your struggles
And I will keep caring,
For I am still your girl
who wants to follow you around everywhere.