Poem: Wild Geese

My regular readers may have noticed that I didn't post my usual Farm Friday last week (and I goofed by posting two Social Justice Saturday entries).  The reason was we were at our third annual Wild Goose festival so I didn't have time to write on Friday and I tried to schedule one post on Saturday but somehow scheduled two.  I'm still processing the weekend and plan to write about it on Friday (it is farm connected this year).  In the meantime, I'm sharing Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese which greeted us when we entered the gates for the festival:

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.