Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”

  WILD GEESE   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....

A Poem with a Gun Inside

  It beats. It hums. My heart— what else could beat so cold and low as this : make me a list. give me a kiss : Kalamazoo, I love you. Paris, Baghdad, and Beruit, I love you. What more harm can we inflict than gunfire on a summer’s day, a winter walk, what...

The Gun Joke

  THE GUN JOKE   It’s funny, she says, how many people are shocked by this shooting and the next and next and the next. She doesn’t mean funny as in funny, but funny as in blood soup tastes funny when you stir in soil. Stop me if you haven’t heard this one:...