Healing Poetry

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.

——from The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

There are a large number of poems that could be offered as potentially healing. I’m offering here a handful that I’ve come across, and written about briefly, because they seem to me to resonate especially well with the process of healing, and because any one of them seems like it could be a springboard—a trampoline?—to one’s own writing.

Here is lovely encouragement from Naomi Shihab Nye for writing a little as one collects poems.

AND here’s the new 2023 ebook version that weaves poems and writing prompts with research on writing and health.

I. Poems that conjure a healing place

Last Night As I Lay Sleeping by Antonio Machado

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by WB Yeats

Island of the Raped Women by Frances Driscoll

Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda

What I Want by Alicia Ostriker

II. Poems about a quest

The Journey by Mary Oliver

Instructions by Neil Gaiman

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

III. Poems that might offer company during a difficult time

The Guest House by Rumi

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye

Satellite Call by Sara Bareilles

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

The Armful by Robert Frost

The Spell by Marie Howe

Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov

Sweetness by Stephen Dunn

My Dead Friends by Marie Howe

III. Poems for looking at the world in new ways

The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Because Even the Word Obstacle Is an Obstacle by Alison Luterman

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens

Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer by a group of women in a writing workshop

If by Rudyard Kipling and Joni Mitchell

Desert Places by Robert Frost

Report from a Far Place by William Stafford

The Snowman by Wallace Stevens

Notes in Bathrobe Pockets by Raymond Carver

A New Path to the Waterfall, a collection by Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

IV. A poem about the process of reading

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

V. A poem for considering purpose

Every Craftsman by Rumi.

Poems recently posted are included below.

Make Your Mind an Ocean

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 2, 2014 in Blog, Healing Places, Healing Poetry

Continuing with the theme from a couple weeks ago of becoming an ever-larger body of water, I remembered a piece by Lama Yeshe called “Make Your Mind an Ocean.” Here is an excerpt from the piece which I’ve rearranged as a kind of found poem. It has to do with the mind becoming larger and larger and not depending so much on the tiny atoms of the world. The mind becoming larger and larger and in turn not being quite so disturbed by the relentless ripples and agitations of the world. If you’re all caught up in attachment to tiny atoms your limited craving mind will make it impossible for you to enjoy life’s pleasures. External energy Is so incredibly limited that if you allow yourself to be bound by it your mind itself will become just as limited. When your mind is narrow small things easily agitate you. Make your mind an ocean. I remember a time when my children were very young and I was feeling like I didn’t have any space left in my head anymore—as if I couldn’t hold any new thoughts. I got an opportunity to go away to the beach for a long weekend writing retreat and I took it. It was a weekend of just myself in a cottage next to the sound and then crossing to the ocean every day—to walk or just to sit looking out. It was September or October, quiet. I wrote a bit, but maybe not even that much. I remember the way it felt as if, walking, the ocean were literally washing my brain—clearing it, resetting it. Washing my brain, my body, my entire self. And when I returned—same young, vibrant children—same life—same ripples in that life–but I was different—and I had room for them again. I don’t live on the ocean—or have the opportunity to go there that often, but even to have been there once, gives me that image—that memory to work from. I like to imagine, especially when I’m feeling too small for the life I’m living, or too small for some problem I’m facing, the possibility of making my mind as large as the ocean. The sound of the waves and the blue stretching out to the horizon—and the depths of it—that vast and deep and large. “Make Your Mind an Ocean” is from The Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind which can be found for free at the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive. More about Lama Yeshe can be found in a tribute to him by a Christian monk, Father P. Bernard de Give, written after Lama Yeshe’s death. The photo, taken near Thunder Hole, Maine is by Billy...

What to do with the salt of suffering?

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 15, 2014 in Blog, Healing Grief, Healing Places, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

Sometimes when I’m at a loss for words it helps to come across other’s words, and just this morning I came across a treasure trove of poems at, of all places, a website of the Frye Museum, an art museum in Seattle, where they hold a weekly mindfulness meditation session on Wednesdays, and have published some poems and pieces they’ve used at these sessions. Here is one piece that seems particularly illuminating this morning. It’s not a poem, but it’s like a poem—a healing story as short as any poem. It’s not attributed to anyone. At another source I found it attributed to a Hindu master. Here’s the story: An aging master grew tired of his apprentice’s complaints. One morning, he sent him to get some salt. When the apprentice returned, the master told him to mix a handful of salt in a glass of water and then drink it. “How does it taste?” the master asked. “Bitter,” said the apprentice. The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take the same handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake and once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt in the water, the old man said, “Now drink from the lake.” As the water dripped down the young man’s chin, the master asked, “How does it taste?” “Fresh,” remarked the apprentice. “Do you taste the salt?” asked the master. “No,” said the young man. At this the master sat beside this serious young man, and explained softly, “The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things. Stop being a glass. Become a lake.” How can writing be used to enlarge one’s sense of things? Is it possible that the more we write–and the more we try to encompass in our writing–the larger we become? How can writing be used to become a lake? The photo is of Lake Mapourika in New Zealand and is by Richard...

Report from a Far Place by William Stafford

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 28, 2014 in Blog, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

I’ve never thought about words as snowshoes. I’ve never even walked in snowshoes—or seen them up close—I’ve only ever seen them in pictures—but I do love the connection William Stafford makes here in his poem, “Report from a Far Place.” When I was a kid and we lived in Michigan we used to walk to school often in snow. When the snow was very deep I would walk behind my brothers–they would break the snow first and I would step into their footprints. That memory is very vivid. Following became a way to navigate the snow. We could call words anything, I suppose–anything that might become meaningful–but here he’s calling them snowshoes: Making these word things to step on across the world, I could call them snowshoes. They creak, sag, bend, but hold, over the great deep cold, and they turn up at the toes. In war or city or camp they could save your life; you can muse them by the fire. Be careful, though: they burn, or don’t burn, in their own strange way, when you say them. Words as a way to navigate the “great deep cold.” What great deep cold needs to be navigated? This week? This year? This lifetime? What words could make particularly good snow shoes? The poem, “Report from a Far Place,” is from Someday Maybe, 1973 The photo is by Kim...

The Armful by Robert Frost

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 5, 2012 in Blog, Book, Healing Poetry

This poem by Frost can be about a lot of things, I suppose. For me, this week, it seems to be about revision–and how hard it can be to hold coherent images and ideas and how sometimes you just have to put them down and rearrange them–again. Madness, perhaps–but also it seems now a necessary madness. I went back to earlier chapters of One Year of Writing and Healing to pick up some threads to carry forward–and realized that deep revision is again necessary. Chapter 2 as it stands now is just wrong–and changing that begins to change everything. Madness. For every parcel I stoop down to seize I lose some other off my arms and knees, And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns, Extremes too hard to comprehend at once. Yet nothing I should care to leave behind. With all I have to hold with hand and mind And heart, if need be, I will do my best. To keep their building balanced at my breast. I crouch down to prevent them as they fall; Then sit down in the middle of them all. I had to drop the armful in the road And try to stack them in a better load. I’m heading back to teaching tomorrow. Launching a new semester. I’ll be returning to the work of these chapters and this site (which also needs some serious tinkering) when I can. Sitting down in the middle of it all and trying to stack the pieces in a useful way. Thank you again to everyone who has offered support and help along the way. It has been a joy to have emails pop into my box as surprises and encouragement as I work away at this. __________________________________ Photo from Quiet Commotion...

All Shall be Well?

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 17, 2012 in Blog, Healing Grief, Healing Poetry

For some reason a couple weeks ago, I found myself looking for the quote by Julian of Norwich about all being well. I found this: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well which T.S. Eliot then included in the fourth quartet of his Four Quartets: And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well And I also found, unexpectedly, this song, which I quite like, by a young man by the name of Gabe Dixon. The song is called, “All Will Be Well.” ____________________________________________________________________ The photo at the top of this post is from Wikipedia. Julian of Norwich was a Christian mystic in the fourteenth century who is described as an anchoress. I had to look up the term and discovered it’s the female form of the term anchorite and refers to a kind of Christian hermit who devotes their life to prayer. Anchoresses lived in simple cells or anchorholds built against the walls of a church. The photo is of one such cell or anchorhold. She lived during a time of plagues. It’s possible (history about her is sketchy) that she could have become an anchoress after losing her husband and/or children. Or it’s speculated she may have become an anchoress to become quarantined. In any case, it does place her famous quote in an interesting context. Plagues were spreading and encroaching all around her and she was writing that all shall be well. Denial? Insanity? Radical...

« Older Entries

Next Entries »