A thank you to the the lovely Joanna Lord (fellow Vermont lover, social media maven and beach dweller) for passing along to me this week’s Poetry Wednesday poem.

***I was at a loss. Got all caught up in trying to find something perfect and was going to give up on the day and then I tweeted a quote:

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.” – Mary Oliver #quotes

And Joanna sent me that poem and it’s PERFECT. Why do we insist things be perfect and then trick ourselves out of stuff? Happy to NOT have gone to bed without writing this post.

Just a reminder, Poetry Wednesdays are a chance to get out of my head and find beauty and simplicity in something other than cause or the hectic schedule I create around giving back. So I hope you enjoy…

Wild Geese
by 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.

If you liked this post, you might like:

On Friendship by Khalil Gibran
Those Winter Sundays
This Is Just To Say

The fourth installment of Poetry Wednesdays is another of my favorite poets of all time, Khalil Gibran. Now for those of you new to my blog going “Why is she posting about poems?” Well, I decided a month ago that I was being bogged down by writing about cause and projects and wanted to have an outlet, after all, isn’t that what a blog is for? I was sitting in bed one night and reading the Norton Anthology of Poetry (ain’t my life a ball of fire, I know) and remembered how much I truly love poetry and the way the words come together in thoughts and images and time. Now every Wednesday, I’ll bring you one poem that is special to me. If there are ones you love, please leave them in the comments!

The poem below needs no introduction. I have read The Prophet maybe 30 times. Maybe more. I often have it near me and flip through the pages. It’s in my top 5 books of all time. I hope you enjoy, for the first or 100th time, On Friendship.

On Friendship
by Khalil Gibran

Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the “nay” in your own mind, nor do you withhold the “ay.”
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;
For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.
When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.
And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you like this post, you might like:

This Is Just To Say
Those Winter Sundays
No Man Is An Island

We are all in this together. It’s too late to think it’s too late. It’s too late to not truly care what happens to the next generation. It’s up to us, it’s up to you and me. I hope you’ll join me in the fight to do better and to be better. You can join today by making a donation to the #fightmalaria campaign I’m in the middle of. Donate HERE.

Click here to view the embedded video.

No man is an island
John Donne

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Last week I posted one of my favorite poems of all time, This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams. I can’t think of that poem without thinking of Those Winter Sundays and so I wanted to share this, probably my second favorite (before we get into the category of poems I just like) a classic by Robert Hayden.

Didn’t know I was such a renaissance woman, huh? It’s true, I like poetry, I bake a mean pizzelle, I once had a nice garden of herbs and tomato plants (ok this was YEARS ago but I haven’t had a backyard since), I have a life outside dedicating my life to others through what my good friend Alexa calls my “fierce commitment to philanthropy.” And truthfully, I need a little reminder about all those other parts of me since sometimes I seem to be falling down a path of just giving and giving and giving of myself and wondering why I feel raw at the end of a day, week, campaign, experience. To be the best to you – the world – I have to be the best to me too. So for now, and for a few weeks to come, I’ll be posting my favorite poems (on Wednesdays) and reminding myself of some of those “other parts of me” that can’t get lost as I expand and explore the Humanitarian me.

In that giving to others, I am strongly reminded of the poem below, I hope you enjoy it and please take a moment to really feel what the poet is saying, it’s palpable to me now, a good 13 years after I first read it in high school English class.

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices

Click here to view the embedded video.

After posting So Much To Say But Where Are The Words, I was reminded of one of my favorite poems of all time by William Carlos Williams. I’m posting it below. I’ve found a lot of emotional relief in poetry this week, caused by finding an old poetry book in my stepdad’s house and reading it in bed at night. The poems from 100 years ago remind me of the Philippines where you have a lot to say and not a lot of tools of communication to do it. The simple and yet utterly complex imagery deeply move me. I’ll post a few more of my favorite poems in the coming week. To kick it off…

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Click here to view the embedded video.