Poem of the Week: 01Jan07

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.
- Mary Oliver

Since we are starting over for the new year, I resolve to post once a week a poem that I find exceptionally meaningful. For the first week of 2007, I choose Mary Oliver's 'Wild Geese" for the beauty of the landscape, for the nature embedded within each line, which calls me back to the plight of the earth. It reminds me of the connection of things - the global, the internal and external, the spaces where we all fit. The shared stories, the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable. The family of things.