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 chosen, 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.
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
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
III. Poems that might offer company during a difficult time
The Guest House by Rumi
A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford
Satellite Call by Sara Bareilles
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
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
Report from a Far Place by William Stafford
who knows if the moon’s a by e.e. cummings
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. Poems about the process of reading
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
V. Poems for considering purpose
Every Craftsman by Rumi.
Through Corridors of Light: Poems of Consolation during Illness
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,...
“The Promise” by Marie Howe
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...
Indra’s Net
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...
The Open Road by Pico Iyer
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...
Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden
“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. ...
Attention Must Be Paid
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the act of paying attention and what that means. Last year around this same time I came across a cover article in Newsweek entitled Grow Your Mind. It was by Sharon Begley, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, a book on neuroscience and Buddhism that I read some years ago and liked quite a bit. This past week, I found myself going back to the article because of something I remembered her saying about the act of paying attention. ...
Praying by Mary Oliver
It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. So I’m thinking this poem by Mary Oliver could be instructions for a writer—or instructions for a teacher—which, if looked at in a certain way, are perhaps not that different. I’m at...
Instructions
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ from “Sometimes” by Mary Oliver, from her collection, Red Bird (2008) Photo from next to our living room window....
Morning Poem by Mary Oliver
I’m not much of one for New Year’s resolutions, but I am someone who tends to pay attention at the beginning of a new year. What is possible? What might be trying to happen in this next year? What could happen? “Morning Poem,” is one I came across just before the new year. It speaks to that sense at the beginning of some mornings—or at the beginning of some years?—a sense that something new is happening, again, all over again. Or could be. This is how it begins:...
Everything, a Found Poem
Often I am asked, Who taught me to write? Everything All the blank times, the daydreaming, the boredom, the American legacy of loneliness and alienation, the sky,the desk, a pen, the pavement, small towns I’ve driven through. Writing became the tool I used To digest my life Not because everything was hunky-dory But because we can use everything we are. We have no choice. Our job is to wake up to everything. ____________________________________ from Natalie Goldberg’s Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America (p. 19, Bantam...