Gwen

Who are you?

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, "Wild Geese"

That Which Is

I crept down the basement stairs one night, barefoot
on concrete black as space, and the lightbulb's chain
was beaded comets when my fingers closed around it
to pull; the pockmarks of the floor suddenly turned
to craters beneath me. Something lifted its head
inside my chest, climbed out over my tongue.
All at once it was cold,
but the room felt weightless
and I floated in the night sky.