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Saturday, April 16, 2022

The Easter Flower / Claude McKay


The Easter Flower

Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
    My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
    Soft-scented in the air for yards around;
Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
    Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
    In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;
And many thought it was a sacred sign,
    And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
    Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

~~
Claude McKay (1889-1948)
from Harlem Shadows, 1922

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

 ACES | Bruce Dupree, Easter Lillies, 2020. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

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