Easter this year is remarkably late, and that got me thinking. Here’s my little homage to early Easter, published in the most recent Windhover magazine. It’s a beautiful little journal, and they host a writers’ festival every other winter. If you’ve never submitted here, I encourage you to check it out.
Early Easter I like when Easter week is warm. The symbolism seems enhanced by every nodding form of tulip, by the gleams of daffodil spears through the storm- shook forest mould, the beams of steeper sunlight that reform our days, stir us from dreams. And yet, is not Easter more than symbol, as the soul is more alive than lichen or the fungus on a bole of shattered oak or hellebore that blooms and withers whole each spring? Is not my death more than these signs can console? Better than this calm return is early Easter—bough- bare, fish-cold Easter, where we learn the sign of Pisces: how Love must go down, into the sea, and return changed; how ugly is a death disguised as ceaseless rebirth, how very lonely eternity within this world would be. Isn’t Easter less like the snowdrop now uncurled than like the one bitter body of a squirrel rampant I found behind the garage, starting to become unpleasant, whose eye gleamed like a mirage and whispered to me, low and true: Look, there is the door. Go, therefore. Pass boldly through. Return this way no more.