When Winter is Over

Just before we left Sudan in January, Bethany shared this poem with our team.

Two weeks ago I got to go to Maymont park with the Masso family. It is one of my favorite places in Richmond. Spring is coming and the flowers are starting to bloom, and I thought again of the last lines of this poem.

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A Short Testament
by Anne Porter

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation 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.