Judith Wright(1915–2000)
Request to a Year
If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great-great-grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,
who, having had eight children
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat o n e day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland
and from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice-floe,
drift down the current towards a waterfall
that struck rock-bottom eighty feet below,
while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock2
(which luckily later caught him on his way).
Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
and with the artist's isolating eye
my great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.
Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned;
reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.