Wild Geese
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 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 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.
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Very glad that this spoke to you. It touched something bound up inside me and set it free. We don't have to be good - only love; perhaps that is the hardest of all.
ReplyDeleteSo very glad that this poem spoke into your being. What a weight lifts as we accept the perspective that we 'don't have to be good'. No one is, after all.
ReplyDeleteNo, not one.