I hope you’re having a lovely Sunday, and if you’re celebrating Easter today, that it’s wonderful. I actually don’t want or need to say too much about today’s poem, “Year One” by Laurinda Lind, because it speaks beautifully and poignantly for itself.

Year One

On Easter morning I fed
my seventeen-year-old son’s
funeral cake to the yard crows.
We heard they were starving,
in this spring that came
and then uncame,
the same way my son and
reportedly Jesus did.

New snow smothered the green grass
and the crocuses, and iced
the backdoor steps
and ate down into cracked concrete.
The stones someone hauled here
a century and a half ago
lay flat and still under the slush.
He is gone and I can’t help it.

The crows watched, or didn’t,
from all our trees. The branches
went black with them,
the sky was full but waiting.
He is so brilliantly gone.
Spring is alive, over and over.
It just can’t be alive enough.

“Year One” first was previously published in Paterson Literary Review.

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Laurinda Lind quarantines in New York’s North Country, near Canada. Some publications are in Atlanta Review, The Cortland Review, New American Writing, Smokelong Quarterly, Spillway, and Stand; also in anthologies Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers), What I Hear When Not Listening: Best of The Poetry Shack & Fiction (Sonic Boom), and Civilization in Crisis (FootHills). She is a Keats-Shelley Prize winner; Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee; and finalist in Patricia Dobler Award, Please See Me, Dappled Things, Poetry Super Highway, and Joy Bale Boon Poetry Prize contests.