Lost by David Wagoner
Lost
by David Wagoner
Stand still.
The trees before you and the bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is a place called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
This is one of the great gorgeous finding poems, of how to be found, for anyone reckoning with a profound sense of disorientation. Having lived for a decade in the Pacific Northwest, I find a certain kinship of trees and mist and mountains, ravens and wrens. David Wagoner (1926–2021) was an American poet who spent most of his career at the University of Washington, where he edited Poetry Northwest for decades and taught generations of Pacific Northwest writers. He was Theodore Roethke's student and literary executor, and his work shares Roethke's deep attention to the natural world. Lost is his most-circulated poem, and the lines he gives it — Stand still, Wherever you are is a place called Here, You must let it find you — are based on advice traditionally given to lost children by Native elders in the Pacific Northwest. He is clear he does not claim authorship of the wisdom, only of the articulation of it in poetic form in this poem.
Wagoner, Lost. From Collected Poems 1956–1976 (Indiana University Press, 1976)
