Just this past summer, when my mental landscape was suddenly freed from what felt like years of dark thesis clouds covering the sun, I started memorizing poems. I’ve only ogtten a few committed to memory so far, but I love it. I suppose you could say they’re becoming like favorite sitting spots in that newly brightened mindspace of mine. It turns out, at least for me, that when I’m feeling paricularly overwhelmed, stressed, or scared, it’s a great comfort to go over a familiar set of words which represent an emotion I’ve felt before, in a calmer time. I memorized most of these poes on the long bus rides (of which I did 19 total) into and out of Denali National Park this past summer, where I was working. I think memorizing written works has become a dying practice, in these days of instant access to the unfathomably large memory banks of the internet, and I’m happy to say, it should be revived.

I’ll admit, I didn’t see the utility of memorizing that which I could easily look up until I was somewhere without internet or cell phone for a large portion of my summer, and found myself in need of comfort I didn’t know how to get. I don’t yet know what my individual capacity for memorizing different poems is, nor how best to maintain their integrity in my mind (words are frayed here or there if I don’t practice). I’ve every much enjoyed the process so far, and plan to continue to add to my repertoire. Next time you see me, ask for a poem if you’d like.

Here below are the poems I know by heart so far. It’s not many, but it’s a start.

Wild Geese
by 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 your despair, yours, and I will tell you mind.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
move across the landscapes
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high above 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.

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world overcomes me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things,
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water
and I feel above me the dayblind stars waiting with their light.
For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

What We Need is Here
by Wendell Berry
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes.
Abandon, as in love or sleep,
holds them to their way
clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here.
And we pray, not for new earth or heaven,
but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear.
What we need is here.

There are those…
by Gary Snyder
There are those who like to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work.

There are those who stay clean,
just appreciate things.
At breakfast they have milk,
and juice at night.

There are those who do both,
they drink tea.