Not Poetry Thursday, Mary Oliver's Wild Geese - because we all need this reminder

Wild Geese
~Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
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.

I have been moved to tears over the simplest things for the past few weeks - and it is mostly because I am carrying so much for myself and others right now. Not to say that they tears were not appropriate ... but I haven't been allowing myself to feel my own pain, so it spills out when I see that of others.

I do not have to be good or walk on my knees -- or hold in my pain. 

Neither do you.

Wishing you space to feel all the feelings in safety.

Because we need beauty... extra poetry this week...

In April
~Rainer Maria Rilke

Again the woods are odorous, the lark 
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, 
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. 

After long rainy afternoons an hour 
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings 
Them at the windows in a radiant shower, 
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings. 

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; 
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 5, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.