Celebrating & Sharing Poems as Friends
the world offers itself to your imagination
Poems with Friends: Sally Anglesea
Hello friends
Welcome back for another episode in this 'mini-series' of The Poetry Exchange podcast - Poems with Friends.
In Poems with Friends, our producer John Prebble speaks with some of the amazing friends he has made through The Poetry Exchange over the last 12 years, inviting them to bring along a poem that's keeping them company at this time.
It's a way of catching up and spending some quality time with friends - over a poem, of course!
In this episode, John speaks with his great friend and co-producer of The Poetry Exchange, Sally Anglesea. Sally worked with Fiona, Michael and John on The Poetry Exchange from the project's very earliest years, nurturing Fiona's gorgeous idea of Poems as Friends into a wide range of experiences for people to enjoy. Sally, Fiona, Michael and John became a very close band of friends and colleagues, and Sally continues to deeply involved and right at the heart of The Poetry Exchange to this day.
Sally talks with John about a poem that has been a friend to her for many years, since she met it through The Poetry Exchange: 'Wild Geese' by Mary Oliver.
Thank you for listening,
John and The Poetry Exchange x
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 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.
​
Oliver, M. (1994), Dream Work, New York, Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press