Healing Poetry

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.
------from The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

There are a large number of poems that could be offered as potentially healing. I'm offering here a handful that I've chosen, and written about briefly, because they seem to me to resonate especially well with the process of healing, and because any one of them seems like it could be a springboard—a trampoline?—to one’s own writing.

The list here includes links to some pieces from this site, One Year of Writing and Healing, and some to my adjacent and linked site, A Healing Library.

I. Poems about a quest

The Journey by Mary Oliver.
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich.

II. Poems that conjure a healing place

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by WB Yeats
Island of the Raped Women by Frances Driscoll

III. Poems that might offer company during a difficult time

The Guest House by Rumi
The Armful by Robert Frost
The Spell by Marie Howe
Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov
Sweetness by Stephen Dunn
My Dead Friends by Marie Howe

III. Poems for looking at the world in new ways

The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer by a group of women in a writing workshop
who knows if the moon's a by e.e. cummings
The Snowman by Wallace Stevens
Notes in Bathrobe Pockets by Raymond Carver
A New Path to the Waterfall, a collection by Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher
The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

IV. Poems about the process of reading

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

V. Poems for considering purpose
Every Craftsman by Rumi.