Judith Wright - Request to a Year
If the year is meditating a suitable gift, <br />I should like it to be the attitude <br />of my great- great- grandmother, <br />legendary devotee of the arts, <br /> <br />who having eight children <br />and little opportunity for painting pictures, <br />sat one day on a high rock <br />beside a river in Switzerland <br /> <br />and from a difficult distance viewed <br />her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,drift down the current toward a waterfall <br />that struck rock bottom eighty feet below, <br /> <br />while her second daughter, impeded, <br />no doubt, by the petticoats of the day, <br />stretched out a last-hope alpenstock <br />(which luckily later caught him on his way). <br /> <br />Nothing, it was evident, could be done; <br />And with the artist's isolating eye <br />My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene. <br />The sketch survives to prove the story by. <br /> <br />Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned, <br />Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.<br /><br />Judith Wright<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/request-to-a-year/