Mary Oliver

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.'

I read this poem in my English class, and through the tangle of emotions and thoughts I was wrapped up in this whole week, this poem found a place in my mind and stuck there. I found myself reading and reciting the lines over in my head when I found myself upset or unconfident. When I was feeling down, I would simply think of the first part of this poem; 'You do not have to be good.' I make mistakes, and I don't have to repent to any higher-power that I'm not even sure I believe in. I do not have to grovel for forgiveness; I'll be forgiven if someone wants to forgive me. If not, then I'll simply move on. I'm just human. Through all my despair and self-doubt, while I'm standing still with my head towards the ground that gravity has pinned me to, the world keeps moving. It goes on without me. I don't want it to go on without me, I'm not going to miss the train or the boat to a place I want to go- I'm going to go there, and not stop until I do, except maybe to admire my surroundings and smell the roses, if you will. My life will fall into place, I will fing and/or create who I am and who I want to be in time, and I will find my place in the world and in the Great Chain of Being.


Trilliums by Mary Oliver

'Every spring
among
the ambiguities
of childhood

the hillsides grew white
with the wild trilliums.
I believed in the world.
Oh, I wanted

to be easy
in the peopled kingdoms,
to take my place there,
but there was none

that I could find
shaped like me.
So I entered
throughh the tender buds,

I crossed the cold creek,
my backbone
and my thin white shoulders
unfolding and stretching.

From the time of snow-melt,
when the creek roared
and the mud slid
and the seeds cracked,

I listened to the earth-talk.
the root-wrangle,
the arguments of energy,
the dreams lying

just under the surface,
the rising,
becoming
at the last moment

flaring and luminous -
the patient parable
of every spring and hillside
year after difficult year.'

I understood the narration of this poem more than a good deal of the poetry I've ever read, especially since I feel I can relate to it. The tone of the poem is calm and traquil...but there's something behind that tone. Some sort of disturbance of the peace. A certain tone of heart-felt discouragement that this narrator has felt. A heartbreak, a betrayal, a put-down...something happened and hurt this person. It's funny because not many people in my class understood that until I voiced this, and explained my evidence for my belief for it. Maybe it's just because I've felt the same way lately. This week I was mildly calm, but I also had that feeling of heart-felt dispointment in the world I reside in. 'I believed in the world,' this line is so powerful, despite it's size. The author USED to believe in the world. Something hurt him; effected him to not be as close to the world as he used to, and I think that happened to me this week, ot a certain extent of course. There is so much more I can go into about this poem, but I wouldn't want to ruin it for anyone. :)