Request To A Year

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,

I should like it to be the attitudeof my great- great- grandmother,legendary devotee of the arts,who having eight childrenand little opportunity for painting pictures,sat one day on a high rockbeside a river in Switzerlandand from a difficult distance viewedher second son, balanced on a small ice flow,drift down the current toward a waterfallthat struck rock bottom eighty feet below,while her second daughter, impeded,no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,stretched out a last-hope alpenstock(which luckily later caught him on his way).

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;

And with the artist's isolating

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.