Encounters With Poetry
And Wild Geese
Photo Credit: Nick Fewings on unsplash.com
Sometimes poetry runs through me like a river; words, phrases, a tumbling of verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns jostling to earth - nonsensical, arrhythmic, untidy, raw, a surprise, an out pouring of something or other from my imagination that hermetically seals a nugget of life. These are poems that I sometimes share but more often are for private consumption - a remembrance of some sort of catharsis.
Other people’s poetry more often passes right over my head, like migrating birds, poetry from somewhere else, from someone else, beautiful fragments of phrases whipped away in the wind, words stripped bare of the usual scaffolding of logical English glimpsed in another guise, letters golden and gleaming full of strange meanings.
But there are times that poems, those beautiful passing phrases, naked words and gleaming letters are arrows to my heart, releasing unexpected emotions, cutting deeply through the facade of my mental understanding to an intensely visceral knowing beneath all knowing. Unspeakably profound, igniting revelation, excavating my soul, re-connected me to what is important in this moment, here and now. Telling me what I didn’t know I needed to hear.
You do not have to be good…. says Mary Oliver in Wild Geese. Oh what sweet relief. I 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 your 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.
Published in “New and Selected Poems, Volume One” (Beacon Press; Reprint edition. April 15, 2004) page 110.
Crossing Frontiers serving you to realize what matters.
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