Easter Afternoon

All morning we’d climbed until
we reached a primitive graveyard
whose stones bore no names we could read.
The season too early for wildflowers,
we searched for other unfoldings,
cumulous climbing the afternoon’s
trellises. Branch water cascading.

Creek side, we nibbled the chocolate
eggs filled with marshmallow cream
we had bought on a whim
from a shelf bare of all but a few baskets
no child had wanted this year
or the last, no expiration date
stamped on their green wrappings.

Not like the hard-boiled eggs in their nest
of cellophane grass I shoved under my bed.
They decomposed like the flesh I heard preachers
declare doomed, yet saved by the sun
rising over an empty tomb.

Through tiny holes, my aunts blew
the yolks from their eggs
to craft miniature worlds within
empty shells. I marveled at how they made
something so fragile hold fast.
Swans adrift on an emerald pond. A bride
in her almost invisible veil.
How long would those eggs last
displayed on a shelf? Kept under glass?

Easter sky. Another one. Blue
as an egg being raised from its dye cup.
Upon it the script left behind
by a passing jet. A spiral
of buzzards adrift on a thermal,
the blades of their wings
sudden gold as the sun sets.