A Short Testament

Often, prayer is beyond me, and this is due to many things. Poetry can so often herald the inner storm that might burst into prayer, but sometimes does not. This poem by Anne Porter is one of those lightning-rod works. I hope you feel its power and its pathos.

~ S.K. Orr

A Short Testament

by Anne Porter

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation 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.