"Wild Geese" + Four Years of the Poetry Box

I put my first poem in the poetry box on this day in 2020, choosing Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” because there is no better poem for starting an ongoing conversation with your neighbors through poetry. Today I put the poem back in the box, along with a note of thanks for four years of reading and sharing.

A number of people have asked me over the years about installing their own poetry box, to which I always say a resounding “Do it!” and share a link to where I bought my own. Four years in, I can say that this is one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever undertaken. Through it I’ve met neighbors I might have never met, engaged in conversations I’d have never had, and reclaimed my relationship to poetry itself through the act of poring through books and magazines and websites in search of the right choices for the moment. Back in my 20s and 30s I wrote a number of articles about the value of sharing poetry with the world. I couldn’t have imagined that a primary way I’d do this was through a cedar box on the curb.

I installed the poetry box in the first year of the pandemic, back when we were still scared to be close to each other. We were bombarded by vitriol in the lead-up to a tumultuous election, as we are today. I hoped it might offer a means of a connection, a little sweetness on the way down the street. I think we need that now more than ever. In the end, we are all “soft animals,” as Mary Oliver so perfectly put it. We need to be reminded that through it all, the world “offers itself to [our] imagination.”

Thanks for reading along.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”