Easter and the Rites of Spring Verse--National Poetry Month 2026

The Resurrection--the central miracle of Christian faith.

It is Easter, the holiest day of the year for traditional Christians, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, the conformation of him as the Christ, and the promise of eternal life for those who believe.  It’s powerful stuff that brings comfort and hope to millions.

It also gives some folks the willies, the hives, or both.  And a lot of those folks end up in Unitarian Universalist congregations.  That’s gotta make it tough for our preachers—ahem ministers since we tend to cringe at the sound of that old fashion word and all it connotes.  We are non-creedal and pride ourselves on being open and accepting to a wide variety of spiritual beliefs and practices united by covenant in communities that pledge mutual respect and support in the quest for meaning.  But on Easter, the stresses sometimes show.

There are congregations where half the members stay home lest they endure the obligatory “annual Christian” sermon or even communion.  In the heyday of humanists in the '50s and '60s when they dominated many congregations, Easter was even the occasion of more of a debunking lecture than a sermon.  You don’t see that so much anymore both because the humanists, who still make up the largest philosophic segment of UU membership, have lost a little of that particular chip on the shoulder, and because of general rise in spirituality in our communities including various stripes of theism and pantheism.

That includes self-identified Christians and many others who identify themselves as “followers of the religion of Jesus not about Jesus,” meaning the rabbi of the Sermon on the Mount, and not necessarily who may have rolled the stone away to unseal his own tomb.

Since the World Parliament of Religions during the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 Unitarians and Universalists have become ever more aware of non-Abrahamic and traditional world religions.  Seeking and finding the underlying, uniting universal principles among them has become our hobbyhorse.  Among the probably not terribly surprising discoveries is the idea that spiritual practice as expressed in ritual is closely linked to the repeating cycles of the seasons.

Many of our Easter services make this a central theme.  It is in our wheelhouse.  It is sometimes done with embarrassing shallowness as a pared down metaphor that the minister can’t quite get his or her heart into.  But in the right hands powerful truths are explored and unexpected depths plumbed.

Stripped down some sermons may follow these lines—

Easter’s date is tied to a Jewish calendar based on the cycles of the moon.  Thus, Easter’s date slowly changes relative to our current solar-based Gregorian calendar and slowly creeps forward such that it would ultimately slip out of spring entirely—except  the “reset” from the Julian to Gregorian solar calendars in the 18th Century keeps the holiday in the spring.

Easter is tied to the Jewish calendar because Jesus and his disciples chose to travel to Jerusalem to observe Passover.  Jesus and his disciples were religious Jews and the Last Supper was a Seder. 

Passover celebrates the Moses-led miracle that saved the tribes of Abraham from bondage in Egypt—a virtual rebirth as a people and nation.  For centuries the Yahweh-worshiping tribes who came to be known as Jews commemorated that miracle in lambing season, perhaps because it was blood of sacrificial lambs that was smeared on Jewish lintels that signaled to the killing Angels to “pass-over” Jewish homes—when the eldest sons from all other Egyptian homes were killed—the  final catastrophe that convinced Pharaoh at last to free his slaves.

Whether or not Passover as a historic event actually fell in the spring, the commemoration is firmly placed in that season of rebirth.

Unitarian Universalists often cast Easter as just one of many festivals celebrating Spring and the rebirth of nature.

This annual explosion of new life just getting under way.  And in a way that is good.  The crocuses and daffodils remind us that in some ways the central Christian story—the death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven of Jesus—commemorates also the resurrection of nature we see around us every spring.  

Celebrating the annual rebirth of nature cuts across and unites huge sectors of all cultures and religions. 

While the Jews were celebrating Passover, their cousin tribes who worshiped Baal and the ancient fertility goddess Astarte (who some paleontologists find represented in the tiny pregnant female torsos found in Paleolithic sites) also held rituals that celebrated the season.  The Seleucid Greeks who  once conquered Judea, as well as those Romans who occupied the country in the time of Jesus, both had spring festivals associated with fertility goddesses.

Paleolithic mother goddess figurines found across much of Europe and the Near East representing fertility and often associated with the later Semitic goddess Astarte.

In Northern Europe long before Christianity was born, tribes celebrated the return of spring with a grand festival to commemorate their goddess of fertility and springtime.  Among some of the Germanic tribes that goddess was named Ēostre or Ostara. 

Like many traditional gods and goddesses associated with nature, Ēostre was often represented by the rabbit, that most fertile and prolific of all warm-blooded creatures. 

Oestra was often associated with hares--the most fertile of all animals.

During the 2nd Century of the Christian era, when missionaries found that the rebirth holiday of those Ēostre-celebrating Germanic tribes coincided with the Christian observance of the resurrection of Christ, what could be more fitting than to join these two together into one holy day.

Today, our spring ceremony mostly still celebrates an Easter with chocolate bunnies and eggs side by side with a Risen Christ religious observance—joining together several traditions, like many other Christian customs do—the Yule log, hanging of greens, and erection of an evergreen tree alongside the Crèche at Christmas time.  

One way or another, Passover, Ēostre, and Easter, all celebrate rebirth and renewal.

Here are some poems that touch on all of these themes.

The Morning of the Resurrection by Sir Edward Coley Burner-Jones, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

Christina Rossetti was a leading 19th Century British poet who was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite artistic movement led by her brothers.  Identified as a romantic poet, she was also a proto-feminist and a High Church Anglo-Catholic mystic.  This poem is one of the finest explorations of the personal meaning Christians find in the Resurrection that I have ever read. 

A Better Resurrection

I have no wit, no words, no tears; 
      My heart within me like a stone 
Is numb’d too much for hopes or fears; 
      Look right, look left, I dwell alone; 
I lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief 
      No everlasting hills I see; 
My life is in the falling leaf: 
      O Jesus, quicken me. 

My life is like a faded leaf, 
      My harvest dwindled to a husk: 
Truly my life is void and brief 
      And tedious in the barren dusk; 
My life is like a frozen thing, 
      No bud nor greenness can I see: 
Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring; 
      O Jesus, rise in me.

My life is like a broken bowl, 
      A broken bowl that cannot hold 
One drop of water for my soul 
      Or cordial in the searching cold; 
Cast in the fire the perish’d thing; 
      Melt and remould it, till it be

            A royal cup for Him, my King: 
                  O Jesus, drink of me.

—Christina Rossetti

Easter Lillies, the traditional symbol of spring rebirth.

Teresinka Pereira is a contemporary Brazilian-American poet who saw the connection in this poem posted on the web site of the International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace (IFLAC).

Spring/Passover/Easter

The bridge between death
and return to life
is full of spring sights.
From the unexpected lightning
to the wind that comes back
with swallows and colorful sky
giving flowers to the gardens
there is a dream flowing
waiting for a chance
to stay forever.
Hope roars and echoes
in joy and happiness.
The lily of Easter and Passover
becomes Spring incarnation
in the eyes of the one who
dares to love.

—Teresinka Pereira

Oestre rises at dawn.

Lady Caer Morganna is the identity of a Solitary Eclectic Wiccan Priestess who blogs at The Wicca Life .   Wicca is a modern religion—sometimes claimed to be the fastest growing faith in the U.S—which draws mainly from Celtic traditions but is also respectful of other so-called pagan traditions including the Germanic and Norse.  Its pantheistic, earth-centered spirituality is shared by many UUs and indeed many practice both faiths. 

Oestre

The snow has all melted
And winter has gone,
Now Nature is singing
Springs’ most beautiful song;
As we honor the Goddess -
The Devine Eostre,
While she breathes her life
Into the birds and the bees;
She's fertile and loving
Ancient Mother is she
From the youngest child
To the oldest tree

—Lady Caer Morganna

Rev. Theresa Novak.

Finally, let’s hear from a UU minister who forthrightly connects with the powerful resurrection story of the Bible.  The Rev. Theresa Novak is now retired and blogs at Sermons, Poetry, and Other Musings .

Easter

What an effort it must have been
To climb down from that cross
So many centuries ago
They thought you were dead forever
It certainly looked like that
You’d prayed you last prayer
Healed your last leper
Driven out your last demon.
They even buried you.
t must have felt so good
To lay your head down
The funeral cloths were soft.
The darkness was comforting
So weary you were
Tired, hurt, bleeding.
You’d seen so much
Suffered so much
Done so much
What harm could it do
To give into rest
For a few days
It must have been hard
To hear the weeping
Of those who had loved you
Of those who had betrayed you
The stone was heavy
But you had to push it aside
Rolling away defeat
Banishing hopelessness
Overcoming fear.
What an effort it must have taken
To come back not knowing
What people would think
How they would respond
Would they think the miracle
Was only about you?
Thank you for letting us know
That we each have the chance
The opportunity, the responsibility 
To be reborn
Resurrected.

—Theresa Novak 

Three on Good Friday—National Poetry Month 2025

 

Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, a Medieval illustration from the 12th century Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg.

 

Good Friday is the most somber day of the Christian liturgical calendar it is the bleak but necessary set up to Easter and the celebration of the resurrection of Christ.  It seems not to have been central to worship in the earliest centuries of the Church.  It took generations for the central symbol of the day—the cross and later the crucifix with the hanging body of Jesus—to replace the fish as the universal icon of Christianity.  

By the early Medieval period art depicting the crucifixion displayed the shift to concentrating in often ghastly detail the suffering of Jesus paying with his pain for the sins of humanity.  Penitent Christians were expected to feel the prick of the thorns on Christ’s brow, the lashes, the weight of the burden of his own instrument of doom, the terrible thirst, the driven spikes through his flesh, the pierce of the Centurion’s lance, and the long agonizing death of suffocation.

No wonder that many pagan peoples regarded Christianity as a death cult. 

Today we will feature three contemplations on Good Friday by observant and orthodox Christians.

This excerpt from The Dream of the Rood comes from the 8th Century Anglo-Saxon and is the earliest known example of Christian poetry in Old English.  The verse spoken in the voice of the tree from which the Cross was made shows and interesting blend of the pagan beliefs of both the Germanic tribes and Celtic Druids which made trees central to their worship with Christianity.

A modern illustration of The Dream of the Rood by Angela Lemaire.

From the The Dream of the Rood

The Rood (cross of Christ) speaks:

“It was long past – I still remember it –
That I was cut down at the copse’s end,
Moved from my root. Strong enemies there took me,
Told me to hold aloft their criminals,
Made me a spectacle. Men carried me
Upon their shoulders, set me on a hill,
A host of enemies there fastened me.

“And then I saw the Lord of all mankind
Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount
Upon me. I durst not against God’s word
Bend down or break, when I saw tremble all
The surface of the earth. Although I might
Have struck down all the foes, yet stood I fast.

“Then the young hero (who was God almighty)
Got ready, resolute and strong in heart.
He climbed onto the lofty gallows-tree,
Bold in the sight of many watching men,
When He intended to redeem mankind.
I trembled as the warrior embraced me.
But still I dared not bend down to the earth,
Fall to the ground. Upright I had to stand.

“A rood I was raised up; and I held high
The noble King, the Lord of heaven above.
I dared not stoop. They pierced me with dark nails;
The scars can still be clearly seen on me,

The open wounds of malice. Yet might I
Not harm them. They reviled us both together.
I was made wet all over with the blood
Which poured out from his side, after He had
Sent forth His spirit. And I underwent
Full many a dire experience on that hill.
I saw the God of hosts stretched grimly out.
Darkness covered the Ruler’s corpse with clouds
His shining beauty; shadows passed across,
Black in the darkness. All creation wept,
Bewailed the King’s death; Christ was on the cross….

“Now you may understand, dear warrior,
That I have suffered deeds of wicked men
And grievous sorrows. Now the time has come
That far and wide on earth men honor me,
And all this great and glorious creation,
And to this beacon offers prayers. On me
The Son of God once suffered; therefore now
I tower mighty underneath the heavens,
And I may heal all those in awe of me.
Once I became the cruelest of tortures,
Most hateful to all nations, till the time
I opened the right way of life for men.”

—Translated by Richard Hammer

Ecce Ancilla Domini (Behold the handmaid of the Lord.)  Dante Gabriel Rossetti used his sister, Christina, as Mary and his brother William Michael as the Archangel Gabriel.

 

Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894, was a prolific English poet and Anglo-Catholic mystic.  She was the daughter of Italian poet and political refugee Gabriele Rossetti  and sister of ‎ Pre-Raphaelite painter  Dante Gabriel Rossetti who often used her as a model.

Good Friday

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

—Christina  Rossetti

John Masefield, long-time Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

John Masefield, 1878-1967 was an English poet and writer, and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death. Among his best known works were the children’s novels The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, and the poems The Everlasting Mercy and Sea-Fever.  In the United States he is often misidentified and his poems attributed to John Mansfield.

From The Everlasting Mercy

O Christ who holds the open gate,
O Christ who drives the furrow straight,
O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter
Of holy white birds flying after,
Lo, all my heart’s field red and torn,
And Thou wilt bring the young green corn
The young green corn divinely springing,
The young green corn forever singing;
And when the field is fresh and fair
Thy blessèd feet shall glitter there,
And we will walk the weeded field,
And tell the golden harvest’s yield,
The corn that makes the holy bread
By which the soul of man is fed,
The holy bread, the food unpriced,
Thy everlasting mercy, Christ.

             —John Masefield

Fantasy and Sci-Fi Verse for National Poetry Month 2025

 

Lurid but exciting covers like this attracted generation of young science fiction fans.  Poetry helped elevate speculative literature of all types reach wider and more adult audiences.

 

Science Fiction and Fantasy, the genres frequently lumped together as speculative fiction attempt to seriously examine the moral, ethical, and philosophic issues of this world by imagining others.  On the other hand it can be simply the surrender to our inner ten year old.   But they have grown from the province of nerds with taped glasses with their stashes of lurid pulp magazines and dreamy girls with unicorn and dragon fetishes, to a cultural power house that sometimes seem ready to crush and consume everything else like that Japanese reactor by a tsunami.  The mega-million selling series of fat books, the comic books, the block-buster high-tech movie epics, the odd and dark TV series, the fan conventions that fill giant exposition halls.  You know the inescapable drill.

But there has also been, maybe a tad quieter, a complimentary growth of SF poetry.  It even has its own organization, the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA) founded by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1978 and a major prize, the Rhysling Award. 

The origins of modern speculative poetry are as hard to pin down as a hopping flea.  There are examples with characteristics dating back centuries, not to mention ancient myths, epic poetry, and folk ballads.  On the fantasy side of the tradition, revived interest in those old forms, including fairy tales by Victorian romantics stimulated writers to weave their own tales and poems set in the worlds of those old tales or inspired by similar wonder and magic.

The English poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) is sometimes credited with the first modern fantasy poem for her narrative poem Goblin Market, fraught with sexual tension, in 1859.  It was published as the title poem of a collection 3 years later with illustrations by her brother, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  Below are the first two and final stanzas of that long poem.

An illustration from the original edition of Goblin Market by the poet's famous brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  The poet was the model for both figures.

Goblin Market (Excerpts)

Morning and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck’d cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;—

All ripe together

In summer weather,—

Morns that pass by,

Fair eves that fly;

Come buy, come buy:

Our grapes fresh from the vine,

Pomegranates full and fine,

Dates and sharp bullaces,

Rare pears and greengages,

Damsons and bilberries,

Taste them and try:

Currants and gooseberries,

Bright-fire-like barberries,

Figs to fill your mouth,

Citrons from the South,

Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;

Come buy, come buy.”

               Evening by evening

Among the brookside rushes,

Laura bow’d her head to hear,

Lizzie veil’d her blushes:

Crouching close togetherIn the cooling weather,

With clasping arms and cautioning lips,

With tingling cheeks and finger tips.

“Lie close,” Laura said,

Pricking up her golden head:

“We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?”

“Come buy,” call the goblins

Hobbling down the glen.

               Days, weeks, months, years

Afterwards, when both were wives

With children of their own;

Their mother-hearts beset with fears,

Their lives bound up in tender lives;

Laura would call the little ones

And tell them of her early prime,

Those pleasant days long gone

Of not-returning time:

Would talk about the haunted glen,

The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,

Their fruits like honey to the throat

But poison in the blood;

(Men sell not such in any town):

Would tell them how her sister stood

In deadly peril to do her good,

And win the fiery antidote:

Then joining hands to little hands

Would bid them cling together,

“For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

           To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astra

To lift one if one totters down,

To strengthen whilst one stands.”

—Christina Rossetti

On the science fiction side, in which new possibilities are opened in this world by science and new worlds are envisioned in the future rather than the time misted past, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Edgar Allen Poe’s short story Murders in the Rue Morgue and his famous Balloon Hoax were among the first fiction pieces linked to modern Sci-Fi although both were also sometimes classified in the linked to the overlapping horror genre and Murders is often cited as the first detective story as well.  But the Frenchman Jules Vern, who was particularly inspired by Poe, generally gets the credit as the founder of science fiction.

At first, by its very nature, which often swung from gee-whiz science and technological innovation to testosterone heavy heroics in the early day, did not lend itself much to quality poetry.  Early verse pickings are slim, almost hints.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, most famous in science fiction for his Lost World, penned some short verse that occasionally bumped up against ideas central to speculative fiction.  In this one he represents essential skepticism and the limits of our abilities to understand things beyond our experience, both eternal SF themes.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

A Parable

The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,

And warmly debated the matter;

The Orthodox said that it came from the air,

And the Heretics said from the platter.

They argued it long and they argued it strong,

And I hear they are arguing now;

But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese,

Not one of them thought of a cow.

—Arthur Conan Doyle

Still, on the whole, fantasy has lent itself more easily to poetry.  The most influential of all fantasy writers, J. R. R. Tolkien, the English antiquarian scholar, translator, and artist whose epics of Middle Earth made fairy tales for adults.  He laced his books with verse, sometime in the guise of songs or lore from the many creatures that inhabited his strange lands.  Some have become little classics on their own like this one from chapter 10 of Lord of the Rings.

All That is Gold

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

—J. R. R. Tolkien

Eventually science fiction, which was fostered in pulp magazines with lurid covers in the ‘20s and ’30s, began to go deeper, ask more probing questions, especially in the aftermath of World War II and the dawn of the Atomic age raised questions about the inevitable progress of science.  Soon hard science writers like Isaak Asimov and Ray Bradbury were making serious alternative fiction.  Bradbury was also a poet.  This poem was written by Bradbury to be recited on a program with Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan and others at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena to commemorate the Mariner 9 mission to Mars.

Ray Bradbury.

If Only We Had Taller Been

The fence we walked between the years
Did bounce us serene.
It was a place half in the sky where
In the green of leaf and promising of peach
We'd reach our hands to touch and almost touch the sky,
If we could reach and touch, we said,
‘Twould teach us, not to, never to, be dead.

We ached and almost touched that stuff;
Our reach was never quite enough.
If only we had taller been,
And touched God’s cuff, His hem,
We would not have to  go with them
Who've gone before,
Who, short as us, stood tall as they could stand
And hoped by stretching, tall, that they might keep their land,
Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul.
But they, like us, were standing in a hole.

O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall
Across the Void, across the Universe and all?
And, measured out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam's finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God's hand come down the other way
To measure man and find him Good,
And Gift him with Forever’s Day?
I work for that.

Short man, Large dream, I send my rockets forth
between my ears,
Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of years.
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall:
We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!
We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!

—Ray Bradbury

Perhaps a woman who wrote some of the most enduring classics of both science fiction—The Left and of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and Lathe of Heaven—and fantasy—The Earthsea series—would be a natural at translating the spirit of those works into verse.  Ursula K. Le Guin who was born in 1929 two days after the great Stock Market Crash and died in 2018 at age 88, is one of my favorite contemporary American writers in any and all genres. 

Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Maenads

Somewhere I read 

that when they finally staggered off the mountain 

into some strange town, past drunk, 

hoarse, half naked, blear-eyed, 

blood dried under broken nails 

and across young thighs, 

but still jeering and joking, still trying 

to dance, lurching and yelling, but falling 

dead asleep by the market stalls, 

sprawled helpless, flat out, then 

middle-aged women, 

respectable housewives, 

would come and stand nightlong in the agora 

silent 

together 

as ewes and cows in the night fields, 

guarding, watching them 

as their mothers 

watched over them. 

And no man 

dared 

that fierce decorum.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

In recent years Millennials and their younger sibling, having grown up in a deeply frightening world that seems wildly out of their possible control and from which they are deeply alienated, have become fascinated with dystopian and apocalyptic literature.  Not that dystopianism is new—indeed it seems historically for every Utopia there is a black world gone horribly wrong.  But once speculative literature, especially science fiction, was largely optimistic.  Mirroring the words that once inspired 19th Century Unitarians and early 20th Century Humanists alike, Sci-Fi writers tended to expect a world transformed by technology and “the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.”  Bitter experience has just about crushed that dream, thus the radical turn to dystopianism and its appeal to the young in things like Suzzane Collins’s Hunger Games series and its many clones.  Margaret Atwood, born in 1939, whose The Handmaid’s Tale may have made her the spiritual godmother to current young writers, still catches the mood and spirit of this literature.

Margaret Atwood among her Handmaidens.

Siren Song

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time. 

—Margaret Atwood