Tag: budding

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.
~Anne Porter “A Short Testament” from Living Things.

While this end of the year’s darkness lingers,
beginning too early and lasting too late,
I find myself hiding in my own wintry soul,
knowing I have too often failed to do
what is needed
when it is needed.

I tend to look inward
when I need to focus outside myself.
I muffle my ears
to unhear supplicating voices.
I turn away
rather than meet a stranger’s gaze.

I appeal to God
who knows my darkness needs His Light,
who unimaginably promises
buds of hope and warmth
and color and fruit
will arise from my barest branches.

He brings me forth out of hiding,
to be impossibly transformed.