WILD - a poem by Murray Hidary

There is a place in you

that was never meant

to be tamed. 

What is it to be wild?

They told us, 

didn’t they, 

when we were small,

not always in words,

but in rules,

in looks that meant:

‘Be good, not wild’.

To be wild

was to be dangerous,

unruly,

too much.

We were taught

to line our dreams up

like shoes by the door,

polished, orderly, 

and sometimes forgotten. 

But what if wildness

was never the enemy?

What if wildness

was not the storm

but the wisdom

to know when to speak thunder

and when to whisper like the wind. 

Is it a howling at the moon,

or simply a listening to it

in a silence so complete

your breath forgets its rhythm?

Maybe to be wild

is not to lose oneself

but to remember

what was never truly forgotten - 

that beneath every careful posture

is the ache

to be unmeasured,

to move without approval

through the tall grasses

of your own spirit. 

And there you are —

with your longing,

your questions,

your quietly burning voice —

Faced with a choice: 

Will you live caged

by comforts

that once kept you safe,

or will you risk

the freedom

of your own untamed presence?

Can you feel it? 

That uninhabited place 

within?

It does not shout.

It waits.

It watches.

It listens.

This landscape is not drawn on any map. 

It has never been seen.  

It has barely been felt fully. 

Only the imagination knows 

how to find it —

taking its direction from the heart. 

To roam. 

To stretch into this new expanse. 

Can you see the boundaries

you built?

What once was shelter

has become shackle.

The slow-grown walls

of protection

now a quiet prison.

Might we have it backwards? 

Isn’t nature, what’s wild, 

perfectly balanced? 

Perfectly measured? 

Nature doesn’t thrash

without reason.

She speaks in both

storm and stillness. 

Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese fly in perfect formation, don’t they? 

The owl waits perfectly still in the patience of the dusk. 

The spiders web.

Meticulous. 

Exact. 

Isn’t nature disciplined?

Ordered? 

Patient?

Free? 

Nature is always fully itself. 

Never anything more. 

Never anything less. 

To be wild

is to remember

you belong to something larger. 

To be wise wild

is not recklessness but a reclaiming —

letting that inform the shape of a new longing.

Maybe you weren’t meant to fit in, 

but to flow through.

What would it feel like to wear your wildness on the inside? 

Wild in imagination and ideas. 

Not loud.

Not obvious. 

Less on the surface.

Camouflaged in the 

motions of the day 

until, in the depth 

of a conversation, 

you share a truth that 

sets someone free. 

The wild in you

isn’t waiting

to be released.

It’s waiting

to be recognized.

Perhaps real wildness

lives not at the edges—

but in the balance.

Not chaos,

Not control, 

but something alive 

and awake  

in between. 

What is it to be wild?

A heart unafraid to listen to itself.