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:
