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). 

 

 


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