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.

Through Corridors of Light: Poems of Consolation during Illness

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 27, 2012 in Blog, Healing Books, Healing Corridor, Healing Poetry, Resources

I have just become aware of a new poetry anthology published in the UK for people who are dealing with illness. The anthology is edited by John Andrew Denny, who writes, at his website: I was ill for more than twenty years with ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. For most of that time I was bedbound, in pain and at times deeply depressed, and I was helped to an extraordinary degree by reading and meditating on poetry that addressed my own thoughts and feelings about my illness. In an email conversation, he also writes about a connection between reading poetry and writing, something I find of particular interest: The initial reason I compiled Through Corridors of Light was that when I was first ill (in 1991) I was so weak that anything longer than a short(ish) poem was beyond my concentration. Now that I am quite a lot stronger, I still find writing very slow, and creative writing is unsatisfying for me unless I can find some relevant model to stimulate my mind – so both of these impulses were what inspired my anthology. What makes it so therapeutic is that in giving voice to one’s hopes, fears, worries, or desires, the poems not only trigger other thoughts and feelings but also show how poems on such themes can be successfully constructed. What makes it so therapeutic is that in giving voice to one’s hopes, fears, worries, or desires, the poems not only trigger other thoughts and feelings but also show how poems on such themes can be successfully constructed. I love this idea–the connection between reading a poem and beginning to write. I think this speaks to what is possible. We read and then we write, and in doing so a healing conversation extends and continues and spreads like a network of healing corridors. I’m waiting for my copy to arrive in the mail. Meanwhile, I can direct you to his beautiful website which contains a detailed table of contents, a visitor page, and ordering information. He’s donating all profits from his book to ME Research UK, a charity in the UK doing research into Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. __________________________________________ See: Through Corridors of Light I Must Go, I Will Go, another piece on John Andrew Denny’s...

“The Promise” by Marie Howe

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 19, 2012 in Blog, Healing Poetry

The book, What the Living Do, was written by Marie Howe in the wake of her brother’s death from AIDS. It’s a book that, perhaps better than any other book I know, walks that delicate balance between making memorial—remembering who and what has been lost—and choosing life in the wake of such loss—figuring out, day by day, what it is that the living do (after). The following is excerpted from her poem, “The Promise.” In the dream I had when he came back not sick but whole, and wearing his winter coat, he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak. . . And I told him: I’m reading all this Buddhist stuff, and listen, we don’t die when we die. Death is an event, a threshold we pass through. We go on and on and into light forever. And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look we’d pass across the kitchen table when Dad was drunk again and dangerous, the level look that wants to tell you something, in a crowded room, something important, and can’t. ____________________________________________________________________ ...

Indra’s Net

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 14, 2012 in Blog, Healing Poetry

From The Open Road by Pico Iyer Chapter Four, The Philosopher When the Dalai Lama speaks of interdependence all he is really saying is that we are all a part of a single body. Perhaps it’s not surprising he is famous for his laughter, the sudden eruption of helpless giggles traveling to the point where everything is connected, our fascination with division hilarious. Quarreling over money is like taking a ten-dollar-bill out of your right-hand pocket and then, after a great deal of fanfare and contention, putting it in your left. ____________________________ See also: The Open Road by Pico Iyer, Part One Indra’s net at Wikipedia, the source of the above photo Also the source of this quote by Alan Watts: Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an...

The Open Road by Pico Iyer

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 7, 2012 in Blog, Healing Books, Healing Poetry

I am rereading The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Pico Iyer, a journalist and novelist, has known the Dalai Lama for decades, first meeting him with his father when he was an adolescent. In this impressionistic biography he peels back layers of the Dalai Lama to present him in nine different facets. The first chapter—the first facet—is The Conundrum. In it I found this, a kind of poem: We are not talking about God We are not talking about Nirvana We are only talking about how to become a more compassionate human being. At times he pulls out a piece of tissue and polishes his glasses A metaphor He has taken off his watch with its sturdy stainless-steel band. Know exactly how much time you have he might be saying and use that time for some good. ______________________________ More about The Open Road: A book review at the New York Times The book at...

Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 29, 2012 in Blog, Healing Poetry

“It’s like a whole universe unto itself. That’s one of the reasons I really love it.” I first learned about this poem from an art teacher. I was doing an independent study with her and she was trying to get me to see connections between writing and visual art. This was my first assignment—to look at this poem and the painting that had inspired it. The title of Auden’s poem refers to the museum in Brussels where he encountered a painting by Peter Breugel—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. (The painting is now believed by the museum to be based on a lost original of Breugel’s.) In any case, here is a larger image: (Do you see the legs in the water? Down toward the right lower corner?) Here is the poem: About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. I love those first four lines. About suffering they were never wrong. . . And, in the second stanza, I love the sense of being lifted off the ground—taken up into the sky to look at the landscape from a larger perspective. It’s what I remember from first encountering the poem and the painting, and I can feel it again now. A sense of being able to get that wider view—the whole landscape. There’s the disaster of course. Icarus. He has this opportunity to escape Crete with his father. He has these marvelous wings. There’s just that one bit of instruction from his father: don’t go too close . . . But then he does. He has to. It’s part of the myth. He flies too close to the sun, his wings melt, he falls. But in both the poem and the painting we’re not just aware of Icarus dropping through the sky. Nor only of Daedalus, his father, somewhere off-stage, watching horrified. In fact, they’re in the background. In the foreground is that ploughman, moving forward with the day’s work. And there’s a sense, too, of others in the landscape—they’re eating, or making supper, or having an ordinary conversation, or simply walking along. And then there are the ones on that boat—that expensive delicate ship—sailing calmly on. There’s all of that. And this other awareness too— The artist and the...

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