Happy Easter
Here is a poem.It is not new, but it is Eastery.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Long Island, Bahamas: An Easter Meditation (two of the 5 parts)4. Easter Sunday: RemembranceThe congregation’s young and old; few in between.A young man shakes my hand. His palm is hard—a worker’s palm—and hopeful for a wife.We honour woman-courage on this day:an empty tomb before Black Mary’s gaze.The women who aren’t girls all let themselves wear fatthat cloaks hard muscle, big hearts, brass voices.Their eyes are soft. Their green-eyed childreninhabit skins the shades of sand, of soil,of treebark, eggshell, cedar, earth, red loam.The braveheart women weep, and laugh.The rain falls with the Gospel.Christ is gone, the angel sings,and the silver rain falls down.5. Easter Monday: The North SideThis Atlantic: bluer than sacrament, brighter than pain,supplier of buoy-pots, candlewax, quilt-scraps, wrecks,ballastbricks for chimneystoves, old tyres for shoes,string and winecasks and even, maybe, bones—the things ships cast off when passing byor sinking down.The resurrection side.A blue hole swallows the unwary, offers upits perfect mystery. A thousand feet from shorea shelf dives undersea a thousand fathoms deep.The North Side ridge looks down. The water’s stripesbleed turquoise, blue, and indigo.You stare into the risen sun until you know.