Poetry Thursday - Favorite Lines

Poetry Thursday's prompt this week was favorite lines - a favorite line of poetry.

My favorite lines are the lines that have inexplicably stuck with me, lines that float up, seemingly uninvited, when I least expect them.

Some of my lines float up in English, some in Spanish. I linked to a poem with 2 of those always present English lines for me - its first and last - in a previous Poetry Thursday post: Robert Frost's Directive. The first line rolls off my tongue like almost no other: "Back out of all this now to much for us." Might be that I used to live my life deep in the "too much for us". Whatever it is, when I find myself there again, that line is all I need to mentally take the walk Frost takes in the poem, and slow down.


Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver, holds another of my very favorite lines:
"You only have to let the soft animal of your body loves what it loves. "

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.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and 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.

by Mary Oliver, from Dream Work