Hillary Rodham Clinton among readers at Mary Oliver tribute
NEW YORK (AP) — The words were by Mary Oliver, the emotions were Hillary Rodham Clinton’s and others who came to pay tribute.
The former secretary of state and presidential candidate was among the readers Monday night honoring the beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who died in January at age 83. Speaking before hundreds at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y, Clinton and such friends of Oliver as Maria Shriver and John Waters all praised the poet’s non-conforming spirit and profound bond with the natural world. They told stories and joked over who would get to read which poem, choosing from “The Journey,” ?Don’t Hesitate” and other Oliver favorites.
Only a recording of Oliver herself reading her classic “Wild Geese” received the kind of applause — a soaring standing ovation — that Clinton did on Monday. After explaining that she learned of Oliver through her late mother, Clinton read three poems, among them “I Worried,” which she called “especially suited for the times in which we live.” Lines from Oliver’s work seemed to echo Clinton’s life. “Don’t Hesitate,” and its urging that “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate/Give in to it,” read like an affirmation of Clinton’s famed 1969 student commencement speech at Wellesley College, when she celebrated the quest for “more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”
Oliver’s “When Death Comes” might have been words Clinton took to heart after her loss in 2016 to Donald Trump: “I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened/or full of argument/I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
The night wasn’t all about poetry. Poet Coleman Barks led the audience in a sing-along of the country standard “Hey Good Lookin,’” which he would sing to Oliver in her final days. Filmmaker John Waters, who knew Oliver for more than 50 years, remembered his friend as a drinker and smoker and all-around troublemaker. He also confided — sacrilege to fans of Oliver and her work — that he didn’t care for the poet’s dog.
https://www.apnews.com/dc1534100b8c4968a82c387fad6bc257
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Mary Oliver is quite popular with Unitarian Universalists. I attended her Ware Lecture at the 2006 GA in St. Louis where she read it herself. Just lovely. 
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.
