Wild Geese
Mary Oliver


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.

Dead End
Louise Glück


I said, "Listen, angel, wean me from this bit." 
I said, "Divorce me from this crap, this steady diet
Of abuse with cereal, abuse
With vodka and tomato juice,
Your planted billets doux among the bric-a-brac."
Staying was my way of hitting back.
I tended his anemia and did the dishes
Four months—the whole vicious,
Standard cohabitation. But my dear, my dear,
If now I dream about your hands, your hair,
It is the vividness of that dead end
I miss. Like chess. Mind against mind.

Beachcomber
George Mackay Brown

Monday I found a boot –
Rust and salt leather.
I gave it back to the sea, to dance in.

Tuesday a spar of timber worth thirty bob.
Next winter
It will be a chair, a coffin, a bed.

Wednesday a half can of Swedish spirits.
I tilted my head.
The shore was cold with mermaids and angels.

Thursday I got nothing, seaweed,
A whale bone,
Wet feet and a loud cough.

Friday I held a seaman’s skull,
Sand spilling from it
The way time is told on kirkyard stones.

Saturday a barrel of sodden oranges.
A Spanish ship
Was wrecked last month at The Kame.

Sunday, for fear of the elders,
I sit on my bum.
What’s heaven? A sea chest with a thousand gold coins. 

To My Daughter
Stephen Spender


Bright clasp of her whole hand
Around my finger
My daughter as we walk together now
All my life I'll feel a ring invisibly
Circle this bone with shining:
When she is grown
Far from today as her eyes are far already.

A Veteran
Reginald Gibbons


My father came down not killed
from among others, killers or killed,
for whom he'd worn a uniform,
and he lived a long afterward,

a steady man on the flattest of plains.
I called after him many times, surprised
when I heard the catch in my own voice.
He didn't know how to find the solace

of listening to someone else speak of
what he'd seen and survived.
He himself closed his own
mouth against his own words.

In the wrong sequence, his spirit,
then his mind, and last his body
crossed over that infamous, peat-inky,
metaphorical water that has no far shore.

I think he was carried like a leaf
in currents so gentle that a duckling,
had it been alive, could have braved them,
but too strong for a leaf. And saturated

with minerals that steadily replaced
organic cells, the water turned my father,
an ex-soldier, the leaf-delicate stone inscribed
with the axioms of countless veins.

The Early Hours
Adam Zagajewski


The early hours of morning; you still aren't writing
(rather you aren't even trying), you just read lazily.
Everything is idle, quiet, full, as if
it were a gift from the muse of sluggishness,

just as earlier, in childhood, on vacations, when a colored
map was slowly scrutinized before a trip, a map
promising so much, deep ponds in the forest
like glittering butterfly eyes, mountain meadows drowning
    sharp grass;

or the moment before sleep, when no dreams have appeared,
but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world,
their march, their pilgrimage, their vigil at the sickbed
(grown sick of wakefulness), and the quickening among medieval
    figures

compressed in endless stasis over the the cathedral;
the early hours of morning silence
                                         —you still aren't writing,
you still understand so much.
                          Joy is close.