A Poem for Easter

To Pius X at Easter
John Hazard Wildman (1911-1992)

Pius, the springtime rolls like a wave upon our land,
White-capped in bloom above the long-flung green,
With flame and rainbowed spray
Audacious, sudden, in the fierce engendering sun.

Strange wise men drone about the vast significance
Of all of this:
They draw on Tennyson and violets,
On hope resurgent and the brave atomic bomb;
And chorus girls in white samite
Put over the resurrection in the city park.

The springtime spreads upon our land,
A splendid growth this time,
Seeking interpretation,
Knowing no answer for its roots within the tomb,
Finding no solution in the cold, unanswering ground.

We, feeling, too, the life within us stir–
The silver flower in the golden light–
Ask why, and will not take
The symbol for the reason,
Nor walk in blindness in the splendid dawn.

O holy man of God, wise pope,
Who spoke the bold, tremendous words of life
And blazoned Peter’s promised strength
And Paul’s bright sword against the night
And pointed newly to the minds of men
The clean, hard facts that gave the symbols truth
And cursed the semtimental lies
That lay upon us like the coddling hand of death–
Be strong for us in prayer
That in our dark, evasive days
We hold the simple truth
Of reclaimed flesh and broken tomb
And know the flame within
The glad, outrageous symbol of the spring.

Joyce Kilmer’s Anthology of Catholic Poets (With a New Supplement by James Edward Tobin) (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 396-397.