Easter Basket
D. R. James
The chalked branch bisecting
the window plays temporary dead
but supports the breezy life
of early birds, who fly in,
stilts first, like fuzzy kettles.
I could look it up: Why eggs?
I don’t need to know: Why not?
The sun will shine or it won’t.
In Michigan, gray and twenty-eight.
In Daytona, eighty-two. Puny
shoots here, fields of flowers,
spring mice, or sun, sand, and
breathy skin there. Cloudburst
or late-winter stone. The garden
awaits its orange day lilies, their
uniform blooms, and ducks’ return
to the complex’s phony pond
is like friends dredging courtesy
from their mouths back at work.
Children will hunt outside, or in:
Jesus, hardboiled and then deviled.
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press).