Monday, September 14, 2009

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "Meanwhile the world goes on"

Vice president Joe Biden visited the World Trade Center at Ground Zero last Friday marking the eighth anniversary commemoration of the 9/11 attacks.

Biden read Mary Oliver's poem, "Wild Geese."

Oliver won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for her collection American Primitive (1983) and the 1992 National Book Award for New and Selected Poems (1992). For her 40th birthday, one of Rebel Girl's colleagues gave her a copy of the Oliver book, The Leaf and Cloud - she cherishes it.

Here's the poem.


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.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

You posted this poem a few years ago and I liked it then too. You also posted another Oliver poem about leting go of life. It was beautiful.

Anonymous said...

One wonders what kind of poem Dick Cheney would offer.

Anonymous said...

"Kill 'em all, let god sort 'em out."

Why is it that Ted Kennedy, Paul Wellstone, etc., die, and Cheney just continues to chug along?

Anonymous said...

Yes, the world does offer itself to us. And yet it doesn't when Big Ugly walks right up to us and smashes us in the face, leaving us with different feelings entirely and with no patience with poets, temporarily

Anonymous said...

No, the world STILL offers itself, 1:58.

Anonymous said...

"Offer" isn't the best choice--it implies we have a choice, as in offering someone a cookie.

"Shoves itself down our throats"--that's more realistic.

Anonymous said...

Oh we do have a choice - and I'd really hesitate when it comes to rewriting Oliver. Yours is another poem entirely.

Anonymous said...

Some of you are missing the remdemptive spirit of Oliver's poem.

Anonymous said...

Maybe, but mostly we're just having fun. LOve the poem. Love (well, enjoy) the near-perverse analysis too.

Anonymous said...

Really, 3:18, we have a choice when we are "offered" an earthquake?

Yes, the poem has a beauty to it, of course.

Anonymous said...

"over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."

xo

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...