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.
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.
For my Easter flower, I give you a dogwood blossom. Not, technically a flower, but a bract; the cruciform bloom is sometimes seen as a symbol for the cross, and thus a precursor to the Resurrection.
©2026 Bas Bleu
