Today’s Poem of the Day is the opening poem in “Spending the Winter,” the latest book by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum (b. 1959). “Easter Morning” might seem an odd beginning for a book whose theme is winter, but the poem does invoke winter, along the way, as figure for the human problems of time and death — the problems to which Easter may come as an answer. The spring’s sweet transience is shown with a little girl who, “faster each year,” runs “by the brief flowers.” And it signals the swift turn of time that connects life, from the moment of birth, with death.

Of course, as the poem moves quickly to acknowledge, it’s equally a human instinct to see that death is connected, in the deep mythological imagination, with the renewal of life. This points to themes explored by René Girard (1923–2015), to whom the poem is dedicated. Girard is most famous for his work on myths of violence and the long human history of sacrifice: “the sacrificial debt / That swells with each repaying death.” In accentual tetrameter stanzas, with rhymes on lines two, six, and ten of each stanza, the poem moves through successive scenarios in which first pagan priests, then technologies of war, offer violence as a means to control the cycles of life and death: “Every spring pretends a pity,” Bottum writes, “For all the pretty, short-lived things.”

“And where in time is time’s relief?” he asks. At the poem’s end, the Easter bells sound a “carol” through the trees, that word connecting in one stroke the incarnation of Christmas with the sacrifice of Good Friday and the eternal morning of the resurrection. The reason for the bells’ call, like a prayer, redeems time from itself. 

Easter Morning 
by Joseph Bottum 

for René Girard

Quick as dawn, the dogwoods have raised  
Improbable awnings, christened with rain.   
Thrusts of witch-hazel, stands of rue,   
And there — there, across the stream, 
In the shade of those dark-lichened rocks — 
White phlox and geranium strain 
To reach the angled light. One bright 
Morning, a clean April day, 
Amazes familiar paths with a green 
Tangle and baizes the winter’s stain. 

Faster each Easter, my daughter flies 
Past tumbled mounds where brambles grow. 
The bloodroot flowers near her feet 
As delicate as bible leaves, 
And slow, persistent ivy kindles 
On old trees. The year will know 
A fresh redemption — Burning green,  
The greenwoods glow — till ash 
And thorn fall back to sleep, 
Counterpaned again with snow.

Beneath such trees, with ragged knives, 
Cold priests once tried to wake the leaf, 
The root, the branch: the frozen world 
That needs new life for spring.  
A lamb, a child — the shrouds of snow 
Would melt in their warm blood, as grief 
By grief, pain by vengeful pain, 
We paid the sacrificial debt 
That swells with each repaying death. 
And where in time is time’s relief?

My daughter runs by the brief flowers: 
Touch-me-nots among the stones, 
Bluebells and sorrels, Solomon’s seal. 
Every spring pretends a pity 
For all the pretty, short-lived things.  
Last night I watched the fire zones, 
The bombers’ plumes and tracer rounds, 
Blooms of war on the TV news. 
And now in these green trees I see 
The graves of gods and a grove of bones.  

History labors, a worn machine 
Sick with torsion, ill-meshed, 
And every repair of an old fault 
Ruptures something new. The sacred 
Knife no longer hallows woods, 
But winter’s blood still springs refreshed 
And an altered world still summons death.  
As long as we endure ourselves, 
Innocence will come to grief 
And mercy must remain unfleshed.

The parish bells begin their carols, 
Down through the trees like flourished prayer 
The Easter call resounding. Time 
Reaches forward, hungry for winter, 
And what will save my daughter when even 
Hope is caught in the ancient snare?  
A cold fear waits — till all that had fallen, 
All that was lost, rudely broken, 
Crossed in love, comes rising, rising,  
On the breath of the new spring air.  

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.