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.