Thursday, February 5, 2009

optimism? too scary

I've been posting a lot on message board for bipolar disorder. It's been a wonderful and supportive community. With the meds I'm on, I've been doing so well recently, everything is feeling 'normal', almost in a scary way. It's hard to loosen that grip on grief I suppose, it is a connection to Myles. Anyway, this poem brought me to tears (like everything seems to these days, lol) and it made me give optimism a second look:

Sometimes things don't go at 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.

Sheena Pugh (b.1950)

Argh, and now I'm sitting here pondering the poem thinking, none of these things happen, who chooses peace. I'm sooo jaded :(

2 comments:

Cara said...

Our realities are just what they are - every single one of us, meds / no meds, loss/ no loss. I glad for your good days and hear you on the low ones.

You may have seen how moved I was by your recent post. I hope you did.

anarchist mom said...

I did, in fact, Ive spent a lot of time pondering what you talked about. I think parenting our living children is so hard, knowing what we know about us and how it all affects them. It's not easy. I'd like to think, like for Rilke, it makes the world a richer a place, without denying the cruelty of it all. I think it breeds compassion and understanding. Or at least I hope it does.