Last week it seemed that winter had just begun, but this evening a balmy wind blew in from I can’t imagine where, and made me think ahead to when actual winter will be over and gone. I offer this poem that makes reference to that point in the future, metaphorically:
A SHORT TESTAMENT
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.
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.
-Anne Porter
Restigouche River, New Brunswick, by Richard James Taylor
At this time of year when nights grow longer, and we can’t get rid of them soon enough in the mornings, now it is, for some reason, that I want to share this poem I’ve been mulling over, about night being gone altogether. Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely to live where bell songs would visit your garden at the break of day?
FOUR POEMS IN ONE
At six o’clock this morning I saw the rising sun Resting on the ground like a boulder In the thicket back of the school, A single great ember About the height of a man.
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Night has gone like a sickness, The sky is pure and whole. Our Lady of Poland spire Is rosy with first light, Starlings above it shatter their dark flock. Notes of the Angelus Leave their great iron cup And slowly, three by three Visit the Polish gardens round about, Dahlias shaggy with frost Sheds with their leaning tools Rosebushes wrapped in burlap Skiffs upside down on trestles Like dishes after supper.
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These are the poems I’d show you But you’re no longer alive. The cables creaked and shook Lowering the heavy box. The rented artificial grass Still left exposed That gritty gash of earth Yellow and mixed with stones Taking your body That never in this world Will we see again, or touch.
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We know little We can tell less But one thing I know One thing I can tell I will see you again in Jerusalem Which is of such beauty No matter what country you come from You will be more at home there Than ever with father or mother Than even with lover or friend And once we’re within her borders Death will hunt us in vain.
Gladsome Lights 