Easter Eggs

Into the long soon-April grasses

have been slipped the eggs dyed

the exact blue of the sea off Portugal

glazed with imported Lapis Lazuli

ground to a fine powder like Raphael

used for his Madonna’s chaste drapery

and others with a wash of yellow

light as lemon polish on tawny old wood,

beeswax humming with thyme and sun

those fields where the bees swarmed

a few the blushing terra cotta

of old Tuscan walls, or apricots

from that tree in my childhood yard,

made into jam by my mother’s

Norwegian friend Annika and her

daughter, a student of geology,

the jam we’d put on good

Vermont ice-cream and eat out of

paper-thin bowls, Roslyn bone china

back in the Bay Area with writer friends.

Even in her last years, Duet the Black Lab

would have quickly nosed them out,

or the neighborhood kids tugging like kites

at parents’ hands

after an hour’s church and breakfast

potatoes roasted with rosemary;

but we are just as apt to leave them

lie, safe in their grassy nest, instead

of coaxing up with clumsy hands

the delicately colored shells,

their lovely, unendurable fragility.

—Christie