— unpredictable thoughts

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.

Tags: mary­o­liver, poet, poetry, writ­ing, geese