"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.

"Five Wishes" by Anne Porter

Kacho Fugetsu, Mid-nineteenth century, Meiji period, lithograph

I’d like to have a wild bird

Perch on my hand

A sparrow or

A chickadee

Sudden with her sharp feet

And fragile daring

I’d like to see again

The etchings Rembrandt made

Of stories from the Bible

Though they’re as plain

As Bethlehem’s hay

A radiance fills them

And I would like to visit

The Laguna Indians

And their old church

Made of whitewashed clay

With logs for rafters

And in it their Madonna

To whom they’ve given

A white lace apron

And I would like to learn

To accept my death

To accept our dying

That strange dawn

So deeply scandalous

That God himself wept

At the death of his friend

I’d like to find

The shrine of Chimayo

Where the lame leave crutches

I’d like to go there

With my daughter Katie

It would be enough

Just to be there

Without any miracle.

"Five Wishes" by Anne Porter from Living Things. © Zooland Books, 2006. 

"Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake" by Anne Porter

"In For the Evening" by Peter Mathios

I watched them

As they neared the lake

They wheeled

In a wide arc

With beating wings

And then

They put their wings to sleep

And glided downward in a drift

Of pure abandonment

Until they touched

The surface of the lake

Composed their wings

And settled

On the rippling water

As though it were a nest.

"Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake" by Anne Porter from Living Things. © Zoland Books, 2006. 

"A List of Praises" by Anne Porter

"Autumn Wheat Harvest" by Walt Curlee

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath, 
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes, 
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry 
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away 
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods, 
At night give praise with starry silences. 

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls 
And the rattle and flap of sails 
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor. 
Give praise with the humpback whales, 
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.
 
Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas, 
Give praise with hum of bees, 
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over. 

Give praise with mockingbirds, day's nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle 
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.
 
Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning 
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river, 
Wilderness river. 

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities, 
Far even from the towns, 
With piercing innocence 
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes 
And four notes only. 

Give praise with water, 
With storms of rain and thunder 
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar 
That fills the seaside villages, 
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains 

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

From Living Things by Anne Porter, published by Zoland Books, an imprint of Steerforth Press of Hanover, New Hampshire. Copyright © 2006 by Anne Porter.

"Looking at the Sky," by Anne Porter

 

I never will have time

I never will have time enough

To say

How beautiful it is

The way the moon

Floats in the air

As easily

And lightly as a bird

Although she is a world

Made all of stone.

I never will have time enough

To praise

The way the stars

Hang glittering in the dark

Of steepest heaven

Their dewy sparks

Their brimming drops of light

So fresh so clear

That when you look at them

It quenches thirst.

"Looking at the Sky" by Anne Porter, from Living Things: Collected Poems.

© Zoland Books, 2006.