Poetry

Mary Oliver, "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...

Mary Oliver, "The Journey"

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting...

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Go to the Limits of Your Longing"

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear...

Shane Koyczan, "To This Day"

I’m not the only kid
who grew up this way
surrounded by people who used to say
that rhyme about sticks and stones
as if broken bones
hurt more than the names we got called
and we got called them all

Andrea Gibson, "The Nutritionist"

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables
Said if I could get down 13 turnips a day
I would be grounded, 
rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness is...

T. S. Eliot, "The Journey of the Magi"

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter....