Last week I briefly shared my feelings on inspiration and my fascination with those “rare pearls” that some artists experience as if they were gifted to them. Songs or poems that felt like they just came, all they had to do was write them down.
“Wild Geese” is one of these gems, which originally started as an exercise in technique but once Mary Oliver started writing, it was the poem and it never changed.
In an “On Being” interview with the brilliant Krista Tippett, she adds:
“It was there in me.
Yes.
Once I heard those geese and said that line about anguish — and where that came from, I don’t know.
I’d say that’s one of the poems that…that just came.”
Original audio of Mary Oliver reading the poem, which I combined with footage from the 1973 film ‘The Flight of the Snow Geese’ by Jen and Des Bartlett.
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
I truly love this poem, it feels like a meditation on wholeness and I am grateful that it exists.
xez