It wasn’t a conscious choice, but at least one poem in each of my books so far has had a “personal manifesto” quality to it. (It’s all very well to write these things, but quite hard to live up to them sometimes. Damn you, sagacious creative unconscious!)
In my second collection, Perfect Blue, “The gift” was that poem.
The gift
Sometimes the recompense arrives
so far ahead of what you’ll give
that you will fail to recognise
the reciprocity, the love
that circles in the universe:
this life a grace advanced, its knack
to meet requital with its cause –
the offering up, the giving back.