Sunday, April 21, 2019

"the green of Jesus"



Today is Easter.

I've baked some cakes and made some waffles and orchestrated a brunch for some friends and drunk some champagne and laughed with Carl and Oliver and cleaned up the mess and enjoyed the impossible green of the garden  and a few malted milk balls, speckled like bird eggs and now I lie on the couch and finish reading Night by Elie Wiesel and ponder the meaning of all things, things of meaning I can not begin to understand. There's always a beginning to meaning and an end to what is meaningless.

Easter another word for dawn.

Here are two Easterish poems that I love by two poets whom I love:

The Palm at the End of the Mind

After fulfilling everything
one two three he came back again
free, no more prophecy requiring
that he enter the city just this way,
no more set-up treacheries.
It was the day after Easter. He adored
the eggshell litter and the cellophane
caught in the grass. Each door he passed
swung with its own business, all the 
witnesses along his route of pain
again distracted by fear of loss
or hope of gain. It was wonderful
to be a man, bewildered by 
so many flowers, the rush
and ebb of hours, his own
ambiguous gestures--his 
whole heart exposed, then
taking cover.
Kay Ryan




spring song

the green of Jesus 
is breaking the ground
and the sweet
smell of delicious Jesus
is opening the house and
the dance of Jesus music
has hold of the air and
the world is turning
in the body of Jesus and
the future is possible

Lucille Clifton


Happy Easter to you.

5 comments:

  1. That second poem blew me away when I read it in my Poem Of The Day app.
    Yes and yes and yes!
    And oh my gawd. That cake! Easter is so fine and fanciful, isn't it? A day to be as brash with color and light as a daffodil dancing in the full sunlight and as sweet as the nectar of all the flowers combined.

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  2. You cakes are glorious (I saw another one on Insta) and those flowers are like little suns. There is something buoyant about this post, a sense of of keeping on keeping on. Cleaning up with Carl and Oliver made me smile. The domesticity of it, threaded through with love.

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  3. I'm trying to figure out the Wallace Stevens connection in the first poem. I don't know my Stevens well enough to know if she's alluding to something specific in his poem with her title. But great poems, both! It's impossible not to enjoy the rebirth aspects of this time of year.

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  4. I love Lucille Clifton and it was nice to see the spring song in your article :)

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