I like to post poems here from time-to-time, and we haven't had many lately. Poetry gives us breathing space because we can't read it quickly; in a way, that makes poetry a prayer, or close to it.
Leslie Middleton sent me this one the other day, and I leave with you today. Breath deeply first:
A Short Testament
by Anne Porter
Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,
And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,
And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I've destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,
Remember them. I beg you to remember them
When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death's bare branches.
"A Short Testament" by Anne Porter, from Living Things. © Zoland Books.
Photo of homeless men under the railroad bridge on University Avenue, Charlottesville; Charlottesville News & Arts.
I like to post poems here from time-to-time, and we haven't had many lately. Poetry gives us breathing space because we can't read it quickly; in a way, that makes poetry a prayer, or close to it. Leslie Middleton sent me this one the other day, and I leave with you today. Breath deeply first:
3 comments:
Very enjoyable read! Thank you.
When I was younger, all it took was a couple of days to leave harms I had done, in the past and move on to my next day dream.
Lately, my memory(or maybe the Holy Spirit?) is bringing all those memories back, horrible events that I had buried, alive!
Nothing dies, it seems. Maybe only Christ can transform wrongdoing, by His blood. I mean, scripture speaks that even the damned are alive in some way.
Withdrawel is the closest I have felt, to a living hell. Sober remorse on the other hand, over the harms I inflict on others, (and I do that regularly without even thinking)at least allows me to cry out to God and say sorry, also to the person I might have hurt. I prefer sober remorse to any other kind of suffering, I think. You can't drown your sorrows, trust me, I've spent years dunking mine, they always bob up to the surface eventually!
It's not as easy as I thought, this becoming 'dead to sin' project, that I have started. I forgot all about the pruning!! How did I forget that?? Ouch!
Nothing but the blood of Jesus....
AMEN! Whew!
Here's something to add a little insight to this plight...a way to counteract it.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/greenberg010711.php3
Mary Carolyn
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