Anne Porter

I recently discovered the work of Anne Porter. She was first published in 1994, when she was 83-years-old! It's never too late. I love all the sounds in her A List of Praises. And I also love the "starry silences"!

From A List of Praises
by Anne Porter

...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.

You can read the rest of it here.

Also, here are links to Music and A Short Testament by Ms. Porter.

How beautiful A Short Testament is!

An excerpt:

...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...

I beg you to remember them

When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death's bare branches.