Easter Sunday, Planting

Thick with henbit and violets, our lawn plays out
green and purple: our wedding colors. The sun’s returned
after a tempest, and bed plants stand still in brightened steel.
All morning, you’ve shifted soil and turned it, made ready,
then cradled each seedling in your palm before easing it in
the cool earth. Some started too early didn’t make it, 
and even now, only the hardiest can brave the outside 
when cold threatens to return at will. 

You can always plant more,
I told you when the cat chewed up your nascent broccoli,
and when rosemary we expected to live forever died 
black and brittle from the ravage of spider mites. 
After all, the weeds carpeting our tenth-acre return each spring,
and each year, the bees putter the same paths from bloom to bloom.
It’s too easy to talk about resurrection; nothing comes back 
from the dead. But if we re-seed the earth every time it fails,
if we tend to what’s failing to thrive, eventually, something must live.

JOCELYN HEATH

Jocelyn Heath is an associate professor in English at Norfolk State University in Virginia. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out from Kelsay Books in 2022. Other creative writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, and Fourth River. She is an assistant editor for Smartish Pace.