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 (1935 – ) is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and is described by the New York Times as “far and away, [America’s] best-selling poet”. Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observances of the natural world.

I selected this poem because it is now autumn and I frequently see the wild geese on migration down the great central valley of California. I love to hear their cry that awakes me from whatever common occupation in which I might be employed. I share Oliver’s love of nature and standing beneath a towering oak for me is like visiting a cathedral. I cannot resist adding this short except from another of her poems …

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

From “The summer day”; New and Selected Poems 1992