It’s the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
the gayety in the stride 
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.
~Wendell Berry “Goods”

It seems unlikely anyone would say
I didn’t work hard enough all those years.
After all, I come from a long line of human work-horses
and I know it takes sweat and tears, and sometimes bleeding.

Even so, I know I could have done more all those years.

I could have thrown myself more fully into the pull on the tugs,
could have shouldered the yoke with more enthusiasm,
could have bent down low with unbroken determination.

You might say somewhere I lost the gayety in my stride,
and you would be right — I ended up trudging through my day,
bruised from running into too many submerged rocks,
bumping into immoveable tree stumps and tripping on hidden roots,
falling into deep furrows of long and lonely post-midnight hours.

You might even say eventually the knowledge of a job well-done
seemed to lay deeper than my plow could ever reach.

When it came time for me to shrug out of the yoke
and shake off the harness,
I knew others die in their harness,
never to rest easy on this earth.

I am unsure what to do next with the seasons I have left.
Even so, I love the wondering and wandering,
almost as much as I love the feel of the sun on my unyoked withers.