Dave Karofsky
Mr. Carney
AP English
May 11, 2011
Reflection on "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver
The first line of this poem is so powerful, and at the same time it's terrifying.
I don't have to be good, huh? No, you don't understand. I do have to be good, or I'm a failure and a disappointment.
It would never be enough to be content in whatever I'm doing; I have to be successful, or I'm a sad case of wasted potential. I have to get the football scholarship, go to the state university and graduate with a degree in business or law or something similar, and then get married (to a beautiful woman of course) and have two or three kids, and be a deacon or a state senator and never, ever acknowledge that maybe this isn't what I wanted for my life, or else God will frown upon me from the heavens and the Church will shake its massive, holy head sadly at me: the worldly, carnal, backslidden sinner on his way to Hell.
My mom will agonize over every decisions she's ever made, asking over and over what she could have done differently and where she went wrong. My family and all my friends will talk about me in tones of pity and regret, remembering sadly what a loving, well-behaved child I used to be. They all had such high hopes for me. I've seen them do it to some of my older cousins; it doesn't matter if Michael is happier doing what he's doing; he's a deviant now, on the infamous list of "Lost Loved Ones" as far as my grandma is concerned. He's a subject of discomfort and embarrassment to everyone, and I don't want to be up there with him.
Every achievement, every success that could make me happy would just be another "victory for Satan" in my life, whatever that means, and the story of how I was led astray will be a cautionary tale told to all my little cousins so they can learn from my mistakes.
I'm…different. I want something different, so I can never be okay. I can never let myself be happy without being in danger of the eternal flames of Hell. I have to assimilate, deny the things I feel, or else the Church—and my family, and all my friends—label my life a mistake, and my happiness as false and illegitimate. And who am I to say they're wrong? Church has its own language, and there's practically a lexicon of ways to deal with people who say they've found happiness in life without God. It's all built into the way they talk and think: if I say I'm happy, well of course I probably think I am. I'm deceived, and the more certain I am that I'm truly happy, the more hopeless and deceived and pitiable I am. If I ever try to suggest that they might be the ones who are wrong, that's just another point toward how far gone I am. Of course I'd think that. I'm lost in sin.
It's almost diabolical. I mean, how can anyone ever disagree? To even ask questions is to prove yourself unworthy of coming up with any answers on your own.
So thanks, Mary Oliver. It was a beautiful poem, but not all that practical as far as my life is concerned.
Author's Note: Okay, this is weird. This is basically a reworking of something I wrote way back in 2006 after I read that poem at a summer program I attended. It wasn't originally about sexuality at all, but reading it I realized that most of it applied to the way I currently feel about coming out to my family, and embracing my sexual identity in general. And I guess that's why I identify with Dave so much. I feel like even though we've seen his dad seem very supportive on the show, there's obviously pressure on Dave to be a lot of things, and whether it comes from his parents specifically or not, one of those things is straight. So I thought I would go ahead and turn this into an essay Dave would have written right after prom for AP English, talking about how the poem makes him feel. If you'd like to read the original poem that made me write this in the first place, remove the spaces from this link:
http : / / www. english. illinois. edu /maps /poets / m_r /oliver /online_poems. htm
My original intention was to work on FML and The Ugly Duckling tonight, but my mind is with Dave and neither of those fics have Dave in them, so yeah.
- The Raisin Girl