Poetry Thursday - Sometimes, by Sheena Pugh

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.

(via)

Sheenagh Pugh was born in Birmingham in 1950 and lived in Wales before moving to Shetland. She studied German and Russian at Bristol University and taught Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan until retiring in 2008.

Her poems, says this site, " are devoted to the project of storytelling, employing a beguiling simplicity of language to navigate the no man’s land between the real and the fictional. ...  Although the spectre of death is never far from Pugh’s work, the poems are fundamentally concerned with life as it is lived, its tenaciousness and exuberance even in the toughest circumstances. "