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"The gift I got was a lesson of life about gratitude, friendship, and more I was taught." Gratitude poem by Max Burchett

by Maxwell Sebastian Burchett


I once received a gift
Not much did it cost.
For me no use did it fit,
But the true worth was the most,
With what it was bought,
How it was got.

The giver was giving all that he’s got
In thanks for some small help.
Nothing for which I had asked,
But wasn’t really the gift that I got.
It was the lesson of life about
Gratitude, friendship, and more I was taught.

Helping this refugee of war
Was rather easy to do.
Since I had been given a lot
I gave little thought,
Had become rather routine
Helping refugees fleeing here from war.

What happened is this.
I gave an old bike to a Ukrainian refugee
Who had been walking trying to find
A place to stay, whatever there was.
Next day when I bring a lock for the bike,
He had bought me a gift of a chocolate box, expired though it was.

How do you refuse
Someone’s gift, you can’t,
Even if they spent
What was their livelihood,
What was their last red cent.
Then I thought, I’ve been shown, this was the widow’s mite.

Then one strangely surreal, but inspiring thing.
He offered me a drink, a toast he said.
In cups I suspect he had found, on the ground
Stirred with a plastic spoon, not pristine.
We sang a bit of his new country’s anthem, not quite on tune
Then we drank a toast from old paper cups.

I think now I see,
For someone rescued from death
By fate I suppose, not by me,
The view of life was changed.
When they knew, what life brings,
And what is the value of things.

Likely it is not something
I will totally know, first-hand I mean.
Here’s hoping that’s true,
But I think my mind is changed
From receiving this mite.
Gives a new perspective on many things.

Some with little or naught
Are so grateful for help.
How small things to me
Rather easily done,
Are so big to some,
For those with none.

No longer blind as before,
In touch, I suppose I would say.
I now appreciate more
The two talents I received in life by sheer luck,
But then two mites from a gift at a refugee’s insist,
His desire to express gratitude for even my small assist.

Nothing I can claim
My own wisdom in.
Still I feel I should tell, this story I should write
So you might know in part,
Today there still exist, ones who will give
A new American, giving the widow’s mite.


Photography by mjimages
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