Poem

Below is a poem by American poet Mary Oliver, which is, of course, copyright to her. This morning, after our Wednesday Eucharist, I had coffee with Wes who talked to me about the Vacuum: the thing that most of the universe is made of. Wes is a physicist, and I can usually just keep up if he talks slowly enough and repeats himself a lot. He described the nothingness which is not, and never can be nothing. Later, in the afternoon, I had more coffee with Kathy and Murray, in order to continue a conversation we began on Sunday night. We looked at Murray's laboratory, where he makes very small holes for a living. A lovely woman sat at a desk making titanium needles so small they can't be seen, even with a microscope. Then I had a soy latte to Kathy's evident disgust but despite my phillistinism, she gave me some information on labyrinths and the poem. I liked it a lot. The poem, I mean, not the latte though that wasn't bad either and I haven't read the stuff on labyrinths yet. Labyrinths, nanotechnology, and a nothingness from which all things come. Talk about your Daliesque days!

In trying to figure out the big stuff, more and more I am finding the poets and the artists and mystics more helpful than anybody else, although admittedly the physicists and technologists are sounding increasingly like poets and mystics themselves, these days. Anyway, Mary Oliver seemed to catch the essence of the day. So here's the poem:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
or 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.

Comments

Anonymous said…

... so what is it that you DO need to be?
True, aware, in love with the essence of all that exists?
I like the way Mary Oliver's poetry makes me think - it almost feels like meditation
-thankyou for introducing us Kelvin.

23 September 2009 at 22:11

Kelvin Wright said…

I think so, although I am always a bit suspicious of the phrase "in love with". No, make that VERY suspicious.
Mary Oliver reminds me of Emily Dickinson, but also of one of my favourite authors, Annie Dillard. Dillard is not a poet but has a similar modus operandi to Mary Oliver: she haunts the woods and creeks and lakes around her home seeing in them the deepest secrets of the universe. She writes in the most exquisitely crafted prose of perhaps any living author.

24 September 2009 at 07:18

Kathryn said…

Magically beautiful poem Kelvin.
Anonymous, I think "in love" and "loving" are two completely different things. Mary has a wonderful way with words, very gentle and beautiful. I can picture those soaring geese and hear their calls.
Love all of God's creation, all the beauty of life, nature, flora, fauna, call it what you will. That's what He wants us to do. Love it all like He does.

26 September 2009 at 14:38

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...

Available Light

Search This Blog