Sometimes we do

Julia ♦ August 17, 2024 ♦ 4 Comments

Photo by Jordan McQueen via Unsplash

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen:  may it happen for you. 

— name withheld at the poet’s request*

This post is for everybody who is heartbroken– over the news, over the strife in this country and around the world, or over personal sorrows, or sheer exhaustion and despair not directly related to the chaotic world outside the doorstep.

My wish for you, and for all of us, is that we take a few moments to find a still, silent place to breathe deeply and realize that even the air we take in, and the ability to breathe unaided by machinery, is a gift we did not earn.

I wish you gratitude and sanity and calm, a peace that passes understanding. I can tell you this sort of peace is possible, even for one who lacks that breath, one who is dying and knows it. It must be possible for us, too. May it happen for us.

*no, the poet is not me or anybody you know from this blog.

If you want to know why the name is withheld, read the last bullet point here.

This post was first published seven years ago. Now, as has happened several times in the past, I’m startled to read that first paragraph and realize the person I’m addressing is me, seven years later. And to read the last paragraph and know, with a mixture of grief, resentment, resignation, and faith, that I seem compelled to learn ever more about what I wrote then. Despite all I was enduring at that time, there were many losses to come.

The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.