Voices from the fringes: Fragile bell of silver rime

For Easter Sunday in National Poetry Month, let’s have something from the Harlem Renaissance. Festus Claudius McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889. He came to the USA to study at the Tuskegee Institute in 1912 but quickly moved on to Kansas State University. The racism he encountered in this country shocked him. In 1919 he traveled to the UK, where he was active in socialist circles. He returned to the US two years later and wrote for various progressive publications. From 1923 to 1934 decade he traveled and worked around Europe, North Africa and the Soviet Union. When he returned to the States, he settled in Harlem.

A relentless atheist for most of his life, McKay fell out of love with communism (although remaining a social activist and anti-racist) and converted to Roman Catholicism. His writings—novels, poems and other pieces—reflect his experiences as a bisexual Black immigrant man in a nation that was (and still is) afraid of most of those descriptors.

I do not know when in his journey McKay wrote “The Easter Flower”; considering the last two lines, it could well have been around the time of his conversion. It works at that level, and it works as an appreciation of the regeneration of Spring.

“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.