easter 2020

by John Tessitore

The hands of the buried have dug to light.

Over night, flattened fingers pierced the leaves

that cleave to the loaming after the thaw,

clawed the soft ground at the margins

of the open yard, and spread to the heavens.

Soon they will be hidden in the bramble

of wild raspberry that chokes the edge

of this wood, in the glade where the oaks

stood tall, on this side of the mended wall

that once marked the limit of my knowledge.

No deeper had I ever wandered

into the wild than this outline of an old

estate, or a farm gone to seed, overrun.

A quiet garden must have grown here

with bulbs along a hedge, maybe a walk 

for girls with baskets, boys in short pants.

It’s still too soon for jocund company,

no blooms to twinkle across the gray sea, 

although the forsythia is powdered today

with yellow, like the shavings of a pencil.

Maybe the season prepares to write 

its way back to routine and tell the tale

of our returning. I may not be ready

to reckon again with time, if what I seek

is a pause in the cascade of days,

a frozen moment, since the ones we love

may not live a long tomorrow.

Narcissus always rises to remember 

this sorrow, and weeps as the season resumes, 

as the vines creep to claim dead flowers.

John Tessitore has been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer, and a biographer. He has taught British and American history and literature at colleges around Boston and has directed national policy studies on education, civil justice, and cultural policy. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Boats Against the Current, and Wild Roof and elsewhere. He has also published six eight chapbooks and a novella available at www.johntessitore.com.