The story of Wild Geese

Last December, my Objective and Subjective Poetry course took a session to share our favorite poetry. My friend Alice Dugan recited "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, with the preface that a friend of hers had recently died, and his parents wanted a poem for his service. "I'm not crying," I remember Alice telling herself. "There's no crying at school."

As soon as I got home, I looked online for the poem. It was still amazing, on that stiff screen, hours away from the warmth of Alice's voice.

I put it on a userpage I had at a site based off of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I had been a very active member (I had far and away the most posts at one period) for about five years... and then... shortly after I put Mary Oliver's poem up, a new thread had popped up on my site.

"Wild Geese!" it cheered. The person who wrote it explained that she was very happy to see the poem. She had read it in Arabic and loved it so much she had recently found the original in English and wow... she just had to say hello.

And that's how I began to be great friends with a poet I've never met. We've been exchanging despair (it suits "Wild Geese", should you know the poem) and poetry and laughter and email and snail mail books (of poetry, what else is there!??) since then.