Poem of the Week, by Anne Porter

This past November I gave a talk in Connecticut titled “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer.” During the Q&A a woman in the front row (whose hat and scarf I had been secretly admiring the whole time I talked) raised her hand. “I’m 94. Do you think it’s too late to start writing?” The whole room was delighted by this question and the woman herself; she gave off an air of energy and curiosity. She was just so damn cool. I told her it was never too late – what did she have to lose, anyway? The fabulous William Steig didn’t write his first book for children until he was in his 60s (he needed money). The writer William Gay, who wrote like the love child of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, didn’t write his first short story until he was nearly 60 (he put up sheetrock for 40 years to support his family). The beautiful poet Anne Porter, featured here today, first wrote poetry at age seven but then not again until her 90s. She was dead by the time I discovered her, a few years ago, and I went on a search for all the Anne Porter poems I could find. This one is my favorite. It is never too late.

A Short Testament

– 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.

 

For more information on Anne Porter, please read this article.

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