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.
Writing and Healing Idea #23: What If the Moon’s a Balloon?
There’s a poem by e.e.cummings—“who knows if the moon’s a balloon” It begins like this: who knows if the moon’s a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the sky– The poem can serve as a kind of springboard for making a list of questions that begin by asking: WHAT IF? For instance—— What if the moon’s a balloon? What if the balloon pops? What if the moon is a hot-air balloon and the Wizard of Oz gets into the balloon and floats away, and all of this...
Sweetness
One of three places that I’ve come across Mary Oliver’s poem, The Wild Geese, in the last month or so was as a kind of epigraph—before the table of contents—to the poetry anthology, Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley. The anthology, first published in Britain, is one I would recommend, and I’ll probably get around to writing about it more here on this site one of these days. Meanwhile, today, I wanted to draw your attention to one particular poem that I found in the anthology—a poem called “Sweetness,”...
Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer
EIGHTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT CANCER by Eleanor, Louise, Lydia, Nell, Rosetta and Sandra I I love my mother, my brother and my grandmother But I’m not ready to go and be with them yet What about my three children? II Questions: How are we going to proceed? What is my chance of recurrence? How did this happen to me? Why am I even in this picture? III A lot of people think, “Why me?” I never did go through, “Why me?” IV Pure and simple fear Fear of...