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 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.
Mary Oliver
In my Blue Star sketchbook serious art has been interrupted by two cartoon characters I came up with years ago that I drew for my university student newspaper. They're back! Adolescent silliness returns with the adventures of Hardball and Riley. There's a bit of allegory at work in this story, so it's not as infantile as it first seems. They are certainly fun and my main characters are very easy to draw. I do sometimes spend too much time on the background.
