I found the poem by accident. A line quoted somewhere. Something about wild geese. I don’t remember where I saw it. But the words stuck in my head, so I looked it up. 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.”
I sat there, in my kitchen, coffee going cold, and read that poem three times. Then I started to cry. Not sad crying. Something else. The feeling of something loosening in my chest. Something I didn’t even know was tight.
I hadn’t read poetry since college. I’d decided, somewhere in my twenties, that poetry was for young people. For people with time. For people who weren’t busy running careers and raising kids and managing the machinery of a life. Poetry was a luxury. A decoration. Not something a grown adult actually needed.
I was wrong. I was so wrong.
I’m sixty-four now. I’ve been reading poetry again for about a decade. And I’ve noticed something I can’t explain any other way. My anxiety dropped. Not gone. Not cured. But lower. Less frequent. Less in charge. And I think poetry had something to do with it.
Here’s what I think happened
My brain was full. All the time. News. Tasks. Obligations. Worries. The endless loop of what I should have done, what I need to do, what might go wrong. My brain was a crowded room with everyone talking at once.
Poetry cleared the room. Not because it’s calming, though sometimes it is. Because it demands a different kind of attention. You can’t skim a poem. You can’t multitask with a poem. A poem requires you to slow down, to read the same line twice, to sit with a phrase until it opens.
That slowing down—that forced pause—was exactly what my nervous system needed. For fifteen minutes a day, I wasn’t planning or worrying or reviewing. I was just… reading. Following someone else’s words. Letting someone else’s mind lead mine.
The first poem that actually helped
It wasn’t the Mary Oliver, though that one started it. It was a Wendell Berry. “When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be…” He talks about going to the woods, letting the peace of wild things wash over him.
I read that at a time when I was waking up at three in the morning with my heart pounding. The news was terrible. The future felt uncertain. I was carrying the weight of everything, all the time, and I had no place to put it down.
Berry gave me that place. Not the woods. I don’t have woods. But the permission to put it down. The reminder that the world is bigger than my anxiety. That there are wild things that don’t know my fear and aren’t affected by it. That I could, for a moment, be among them.
I started reading that poem every morning. Just that one. For weeks. It became a kind of anchor. A thing I could hold onto when the anxiety started spinning.
The second thing poetry did
It gave me words for feelings I didn’t have words for.
Anxiety is vague. It’s a fog. It’s a feeling that something is wrong without knowing what. Poetry is specific. It names things. It finds the exact word for the exact feeling. And when you can name something, it loses some of its power.
I found a poem by Jane Kenyon about depression. “It might have been otherwise.” She writes about waking up, making coffee, taking the dog out. Just living. And the relief of that. The miracle of an ordinary day when your brain wants to tell you everything is terrible.
I didn’t know I needed that poem. I didn’t know I needed permission to find relief in ordinary things. But there it was. Someone else had felt what I felt and found a way out. Not a cure. A way. That made me feel less alone. And feeling less alone was its own kind of medicine.
Poetry gave me a different relationship with time
Anxiety is about the future. Always. What will happen. What might happen. What I need to do about it. Poetry is about the present. A poem exists in the moment you’re reading it. It doesn’t care about your to-do list. It doesn’t care about tomorrow. It just wants you to be here, now, with these words.
I started reading a poem every morning. Right after coffee. Before my phone. Just a few minutes. And I noticed that those few minutes changed the shape of my day. I started the day present instead of started the day already running. I started the day with someone else’s voice instead of my own anxious one. I started the day slow instead of fast.
That didn’t just feel better. It changed what happened next. I was less reactive. Less rushed. Less likely to snap at someone because my nervous system was already on high alert. The poem didn’t fix anything. But it set a different tone. And tone matters.
The practical part
I’m not a scholar. I don’t understand most of what I read the first time. I don’t analyze. I don’t write essays. I just read. Slowly. Sometimes the same poem for weeks. Sometimes I don’t understand it. That’s fine. Understanding isn’t the point. Being with it is the point.
I keep a book of poems on my nightstand. Just one. When I finish it, I get another. I don’t collect them. I don’t organize them. I just read. A poem a day. Sometimes more. Sometimes the same one for a week because it’s not done with me yet.
I don’t have a system. I don’t have goals. I’m not trying to be well-read or cultured. I’m trying to give my brain something that isn’t news, isn’t tasks, isn’t the endless loop of my own worries. I’m trying to let someone else’s words clear the room.
What I’ve noticed
I wake up less at three in the morning. When I do, I have a poem to go back to. A line that anchors me. Something to think about that isn’t the thing my brain wants to spin on.
I’m less reactive during the day. That surprised me. I didn’t think fifteen minutes of poetry would change how I talked to my wife or handled a difficult email. But it does. It’s like starting the day with a different fuel. My nervous system isn’t primed for emergency. It’s primed for something slower. Something deeper.
I have a different relationship with my own thoughts. Anxiety is a monologue. A single voice, telling the same story, over and over. Poetry is a dialogue. Someone else’s voice enters the room. The monologue breaks. The story changes. Even for a moment. And that moment is enough to remind me that my anxious thoughts are not the only thoughts. They’re not the only story.
The poems that work for me
Mary Oliver for when I need to remember the world is bigger than my worries. Wendell Berry for when I need permission to be still. Jane Kenyon for when I need to know I’m not alone in the dark. Billy Collins for when I need to laugh at myself. Rumi for when I need to remember that the thing I’m looking for might already be here.
I don’t recommend any of these for you. You’ll find your own. That’s the thing about poetry. It’s personal. What works for me might not work for you. But something will. There’s a poem out there that will clear your room. You just have to go looking.
The science, if you need it
I looked into this after I noticed what was happening. There’s research. Poetry activates the same parts of the brain as music. It creates a mild trance state. It slows heart rate. It reduces cortisol. It’s not just in your head. It’s in your body. Reading poetry is a physiological intervention.
They’ve done studies. People who read poetry show lower stress markers. People who write poetry show even more improvement. Something about finding language for what you’re feeling. Something about the rhythm, the breath, the physical act of reading or writing in lines.
I don’t need the science. I feel it. But it’s nice to know I’m not imagining it. That the poem is actually doing something. That my anxiety dropped for a reason, not just because I got older or because life got easier.
It’s not a cure
I still get anxious. I still wake up sometimes. I still have days when the loop starts spinning and I can’t stop it. Poetry doesn’t fix that. Nothing fixes that.
But it gives me something to reach for. A tool. A rope. A thing I can do when the anxiety is spinning that isn’t reaching for my phone, isn’t eating something I don’t want, isn’t trying to think my way out of a feeling that thinking can’t solve.
I read a poem. I read it slow. I read it again. I let someone else’s words take up space in my head for a few minutes. And usually, by the time I’m done, the loop has loosened. The room is quieter. I can breathe.
If you haven’t read poetry since high school
Start somewhere. You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to like it. You just have to find one poem that does something to you. That makes you stop. That makes you read it twice. That leaves something in the room after you’ve closed the book.
It might take a while. I went through three books before I found the Mary Oliver. Three books of poems that did nothing for me. That’s fine. You’re not looking for a lot. You’re looking for one. One poem that opens something. One poem that clears the room.
Put it somewhere you’ll see it. Tape it to the fridge. Keep it in your phone. Read it in the morning. Read it when your brain won’t shut up. Let it be the thing you reach for instead of the thing that makes everything worse.
The poem that started it
I still have the Mary Oliver. It’s on my nightstand. A little worn. Coffee stained. I don’t read it every morning anymore. But I read it when I need to remember.
“You do not have to be good.” That line. I’d spent my whole life trying to be good. Trying to get it right. Trying to earn my place. And here was a poem telling me I didn’t have to. That I could just… be. That the world was going to keep turning whether I was good or not. That the sun was going to rise, and the rain was going to fall, and the wild geese were going to head south, and none of it depended on me being perfect.
I didn’t know I needed permission to stop trying so hard. But I did. And the poem gave it to me.
My anxiety dropped. Not because I fixed anything. Because I stopped trying to fix everything. Because I let someone else’s words remind me that the world is bigger than my worry. That the sun will rise. That I don’t have to be good.
That’s what poetry did. That’s what it still does.
Clear the room. One poem at a time.