Hurt and Help and Hope

Perhaps it’s a gift of the sol-stice,

the turning back of the sun

to save us from the accumulating darkness

that has provided the date to start a new year,

a place to put a stake in the ground,

a post on which we mount a sign

that says on one side “past”

and on its reverse “future”. 

Except for that solstice, the place we put that stake might be arbitrary,

but because we have that same sky to gaze up to

we are in a great, extra-denominational family
regardless of what name we use for God. 

And perhaps we are fortunate if our spirits have sagged under the weight of this darkness,

if we are nearly broken by it,

our guts compressed under those heavy skies so hard

that a primal word which in pride 

we had tried to suppress

has erupted from us:

Help!

So when we hear it,

we wonder to whom we have spoken it.

So as the sky lifts from us each morning

one more minute of night,

we find ourselves looking forward for signs

of a God we need

even as we feel the dross of past wounds and failures,

of little twigs broken and soft soil crushed

on the path of the year behind us:

wounded others, 

wounded by others.

Thanks to The Writers’ Almanac for the Anne Porter Poem below, that seems to me to see hope and contrition as the woof and warp of the fabric that is the seamless garment of human flesh.

A Short Testament

by 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.