there in our snug living
room, a TV tray her craft
center, my mom worked
pysanky witchery, laughed
at Carol Burnett, M*A*S*H*,
All in the Family, as she
gently pricked a hole
with her needle at the small
end of an egg, blowing
never-to-be chicks
through the other end
into a bowl for scrambling,
then focusing her gaze,
heating the Kiska over
candle flame, drawing
beeswax lines, mixing
crucifixion with pagan
arcadia hex signs:
eight-point stars, arrowed
branches, Golgotha crosses
on one side, cottontails
munching verdure on the other.
These waxed images would
remain white, pure, as she
dipped shells into scarlet,
vermillion, the purple of
resurrection, settled her
folk-art palimpsests of death
and spring, paeans to sun gods,
to the son as God, back in their
cardboard nest. Despite Episcopal
Sundays, her scant sense of history,
cosmology, Mom may have
felt what Egyptians, Greeks,
Romans believed: our universe
emerged from a mother’s egg.
Let’s leave her here:
30 years after Babi Yar,
two decades before Ukraine
would break free from Soviet’s
Union, 50 years before Russia
would bomb Kyiv, Kharkov,
when pysanky will scatter streets
with silt, shattered fine as bone.
is an award-winning, retired teaching professor of English at Penn State and founder of Chancellor Writing Services. She’s dropped poetry into dozens of literary journals and anthologies, among them: Blue Lake Review, Southern Review, Gyroscope Review, and Oyster River Pages. Kelsay Books published her first poetry collection, Biking Through the Stone Age, in May 2022. Her second collection, American Daughters, also published by Kelsay, will appear in January 2023. She is at work on a third collection entitled Elsewhere, walking and biking, serving as a home chef/caterer, and loving on her friends, family, and dog.
Author’s website: www.vasmithpoetry.com
