This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
For those of the Christian faith, yesterday wasn’t just any other day. Also known as Resurrection Sunday, Easter is considered the most important day of the Church calendar. For others, it is a time for Easter baskets, Easter bonnets, Egg hunts, and family gatherings. Still others focus on spring and rebirth. Concerning her poem “Easter,” Courtney Bambrick says, “I try to see holiness as vast and diffuse rather than emanating from a single source.”
Courtney Bambrick served as poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories from 2010 until 2024. Her own poems appear in Landlocked Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, Thimble, SWWIM Everyday, New York Quarterly, Invisible City, The Fanzine, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and more. She teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia.
Whatever your faith tradition, you’ll find within today’s poem ripples of faith and pragmatism. There’s faith that not everything dies, faith in capital and lower-case resurrections, faith that on most mornings we will open our eyes, even after dreaming of death. But there’s also the practical recognition that, yes, even in the midst of spring, the cold might return. Best not to waste time. Don your most colorful clothes and celebrate life.
Here’s “Easter” by Courtney Bambrick
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Warmer than it’s been all year, the weekend
comes to us as a gift of spring. But I’ll keep a bag
of salt on the porch, a plastic snow shovel,
just in case.
Today, we are told that dead things
aren’t always dead. Death cannot kill all.
This is a fact. The roses in the yard,
the oregano: small green fingers splitting
ashen earth. Each waking is a resurrection:
each morning, the stone is rolled away
and it is Easter.
Eyes open and seeing after
a night of dreamed death. Marbles
down a gutter, dreams are lost.
New day, in colorful clothes and sunblock,
we shimmer in sunshine, riffling like wings
before settling. Forget the voided dreams.
Forget how much life we have lived dead.
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That was “Easter” by Courtney Bambrick. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
