Remember judge and you shall
Be judged
For laughing in school, for being
Stupid and always wrong.
Penance like the scent of the sheep
Is slow O’ weary, its coat
A kind of fluff that goes up
In filament theory.
Your own life ahead follows you
Like a scientist posing as a shepherd.
Copyright @ 2014 by Fanny Howe. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on August 27, 2014.
“This is a brief meditation on the way we believe we have escaped our negative acts, until later, when we realize much of our life has been a kind of penance for those acts. Science believes it has the answers to such personal mysteries, but I wonder."
—Fanny Howe
The author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, Fanny Howe received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her collection Selected Poems.