The poet Mary Oliver died two days ago, January 17, 2019. I want some of her poems read at my funeral. She has written many poems that speak to me. It will be a long funeral. Although her poems are pleasant to read and hear, they are not appropriate for the sentiment on greeting cards because they are not sentimental. Underneath the beauty of her words there is an unblinking recognition of the ache of life.
My first and favorite Oliver poem is “Wild Geese.” This poem succinctly offers the vision that runs through all of her poems. I was struck by the first line: “You don’t have to be good.” I knew she could not be advocating immorality. Two lines down I discovered her moral source. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Although Oliver is often referred to as a nature poet, her poems are not about nature as if nature was something else. We are nature in her view. When she refers to nature it is to know ourselves. She acutely feels our human alienation from the material world and through her poems reminds us of our rootedness in mother earth.
Oliver’s poems suggest the possibility of recovery, of healing the split between nature and human nature. The next line in “Wild Geese” offers a difficult camaraderie. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” We have each other to share the joys and troubles of the human journey. Oliver proposes no Pollyanna vision of comfort in nature. “Meanwhile the world goes on.” The natural world continues unperturbed by human drama. Sun, rain, trees, mountains, rivers, wild geese persist in being what they are. Yet, there is the possibility of healing our estrangement from the elemental world. It lies in our imagination, our ability to interpret given experiences.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
We are of the earth, not merely on it. We are not something else, something foreign and exotic. We are from here, evolved and evolving earth beings. Oliver’s poems are scripture for a people who know this in the core of their being. Her poems are an invitation to homecoming.