Easter Poem

A tiny resurrection poem, treating certain lives as singular visitations that cross the world once and do not return.

'Easter Poem' is three widely spaced lines about the unrepeatable: 'There are those who embody', 'Those who will never come again', who 'just once walk across the world'. Under the Easter title, the lines hold resurrection and its refusal in the same breath - some presences cross the world a single time and are not given back.

The whole poem hangs on the word 'embody', left without an object, so that what these people embody stays open: spirit, meaning, a life, the holiday's own promise. Set against an Easter title, 'will never come again' reads almost as heresy, the flat denial of the very return the day celebrates - or as the human truth the resurrection story consoles us against. The blank lines between the three statements do real work, isolating each as its own slow utterance and enacting the singularity it describes; the lines themselves come once and do not repeat. 'Just once walk across the world' keeps the scale cosmic but the gesture small and pedestrian, a single passage on foot rather than a descent from heaven, which is what makes the loss feel ordinary and total at the same time.