Paschal Moon: Perfumed power

Well, I’ll be blowed. Here it is April, and National Poetry Month. As today is also Easter (which we kicked off last night with a Paschal Blue Moon), let’s have something appropriate to the day to get us started.

Specifically, a poem called “The Easter Flower”, by [Festus] Claude McKay (1889-1948), Jamaican-born, and a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance. As a young man, McKay left Jamaica to study at the Tuskegee Institute, where he was shocked by the racism he encountered, and chafed under what he described as “semi-military, machine-like” life at the school. He left Georgia to attend Kansas State University, where he was fired up by the works of W.E.B. DuBois.

He embarked on a career of socialist activism and literary efforts in America, Britain and Russia, before returning to the U.S. to become a fixture in Harlem. Late in life he converted to Catholicism. Today’s poem is from 1922, published in his Harlem Shadows, so it predates his conversion by a couple of decades. But you can see that, even as an atheist, McKay was swayed by thoughts of the resurrection.

“The Easter Flower”

Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly

My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,

Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily

Soft-scented in the air for yards around.

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!

Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,

It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief

In the young pregnant year at Eastertime.

And many thought it was a sacred sign,

And some called it the resurrection flower;

And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,

Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

Χριστός Ανέστη