Anne Porter, Living Things: Collected Poems

"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."