Promptly Poetry

Anonymous Benefactor

Anonymous Benefactor

Moved by sudden impulse,
we left the tropical heat
and dust of savannah life,
to wind back the years
to the island of my birth,
the place known as home,
as it was to me,
who had never settled
in the African sun,
rootless and yearning
for I knew not what.
But home it was and became,
accepting me with open arms
and cold and rain and snow,
land of my people, loved
already for they echoed my
inwardness and quiet.
To my family’s town
we drifted, looking for a place
to stay, and fate led us
to my grandmother’s house
where, for a time, we stayed
to watch over her declining
months. Yet funds were low
and work was scarce,
until a day when a letter arrived,
postmarked London, though
we knew no one there,
and, upon opening it
discovered a banker’s draft
for just enough to carry us through.
No name was attached and,
to this day, we know not why
or who and how it should be,
but I suspect that, somewhere
in that vast metropolis
God moved His servant
to order the draft,
addressing it then to us,
strangers from a strange land
that he or she never knew,
the address, no doubt,
being culled from some phonebook
kept in heaven for emergencies.


Line Count: 44
Free Verse
For Promptly Poetry, Week 14 2020
Prompt: A day someone surprised you with kindness.