Searching for poems for my cousin and finding three for me and mine instead

Sometimes
Sheenagh Pugh

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.


Wild Geese
Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rives.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


Repression
C. K. Williams

More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the
aches and sad softenings,
I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once
thought were evidences of repression,
sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be
varieties of dignity, withholding, tact,
and sometimes even in myself, certain patiences I would have
once called lassitude, indifference,
now seem possibly to be if not the rewards then at least the
unsuspected, undreamed-of conclusions
to many of the even-then-preposterous self-evolved disciplines,
rigors, almost mortifications
I inflicted on myself in my starting-out days, improvement days,
days when the idea alone of psychic peace,
of intellectual, of emotional quiet, the merest hint, would have
meant inconceivable capitulation.