Tuesday, Day 24: Easter Basket

Tuesday, Day 24: Easter Basket

Here is an autobiographical poem that captures a post-Easter adventure (involving an Easter basket put to use in a new way) from a few years ago. My excuse for not posting earlier is that I lost my computer! Thank goodness I live in the kind of community where all things lost eventually come back to us.

Saved

When your daughter cups her gloved hands
around the baby grackle’s downy skin, you think,
This is going to end badly. Still, when she empties

her Easter basket, lines it with horse hair--
when she spends her last ten dollars
on worms—when she tells the clerk at Jerry’s U-Save

to fuck off after he asks, Don’t you believe
in natural selection?—when she sits
on the deck for two long days,

feeding the squawking bird fragments of worms
carefully cut with your best kitchen knife,
dropping water from a doll’s bottle into its open beak—

you keep your mouth shut.

And when the bird wakes you on the second day
by crying out her demands for worms and water,

you think, maybe love and attention

can fix anything. For a second,
you forget the inevitable future,

imagine instead your daughter
holding out her palms, a flutter of wings.
Why does everything I love have to die?

she will shout later, sobbing. You will go out
together with a flashlight
and sink a flowering bush over

the grackle’s body, tiny, still.
The next morning, when she wakes,
she’ll ask, Mama, do you still

love me?

 Of course I do,
baby, why do you ask?

 Instead of answering,
she’ll go out to the garden
to release what is left of the worms.

She will watch as they bury themselves
in the soil, oblivious
to what it means to be saved.