Concert for mental health

Husband is good at singing and belongs to a rather good chamber choir. I go along to the concerts to be educated, as the choir master turns around to the audience and tells us all about the composers and the songs. He has many years knowledge and experience and used to be a professional singer, Cambridge Chorister etc.

Yesterday the concert was in Dorking and was in aid of a voluntary mental health initiative. (There are two psychotherapists in the choir). We also had some readings by the group who are starting the initiative - really great people. These three poems are new to me and are rather lovely, especially the Walcott.

The Healing by D.H. Lawrence

I am not a mechanism; an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds deep to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
And patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
Long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake
Which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

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. 

Love After Love

By Derek Walcott 

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Source: http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/love-after-love-by-derek-walcott#ixzz42ofgjRl5