"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, 2006.