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
This photo of a family of Canadian Geese was taken by Ken West Iowa Landscape and Nature Photography. Ken West and his unique landscape photographs are featured on IPTV show Iowa Outdoors.
For more on Mary Oliver see The Journey by Mary Oliver, with links to other poems and an interview with Maria Shriver.
Listen to Mary Oliver read “Wild Geese” for The On Being Project. This poem is featured in Mary Oliver’s extraordinary conversation with Krista Tippett—one of the few in-depth interviews she gave in her lifetime: “I got saved by the beauty of the world.” She describes her creative process On Being: Listening to the World.
Mary Oliver Reads Wild Geese (14:36) from A Thousand Mornings (1986) at the 92nd St Y, New York in 2012.
A beautiful soundtrack was later added to her reciting this poem and posted on Instagram by coffee_with_keats.
Mary Oliver’s poem, Swan, asks us if we see, hear, and feel what she does, drawing rich references to the beautiful aspects of a swan, culminating in two powerful questions.
Mary Oliver’s poem, Mockingbirds, teaches us how to listen, and experience the wonders around us.
See this remembrance of Mary Oliver with links to more of her poems.
The Uncarved Blog 