Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creationIf 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 oldWhom 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 nearThat 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 promisesBurst into song on death’s bare branches.
Photo Credit: Mike Sewell
"A Short Testament" by Anne Porter from Living Things, Zoland Books, 2006.