Easter Lilies

Easter Lilies


We forget all about them
in the year's darkness, in the long winter.

Without a sound they are there one morning;
a kind of sunlight grown from the ground -

as if some call had woken them
from the underworld of their sleep,

out into the middle of March
to Easter the earth with their heads.

Flapped and flayed by the wind,
broken yolks splashing the air;

all that we had hoped for -
an answer to prayer.



From Kenneth Steven's 2014 collection from SPCK in London, Coracle