Gardeners and Other Easter Types

 It is Easter morning, and we will go to church for the later service, where my spouse will sing in the choir.  It is Easter morning, the first Easter in many years that I don't have a lot of church duties.  I am aware that it may be one of the last Easters where I don't have a lot of church duties, so we have taken a low-key approach to Holy Week.  Plus it's been very rainy, which made me want to stay put.

We have found ourselves exhausted, part way through a home remodel, part way through an intense schedule of classes, both ones I've been taking and the ones I've been teaching.  We've spent much of the time between Thursday and now sleeping and napping.

I have been thinking about the stories we don't hear in our liturgies.  In the past few years, I've been hearing more about the women who stayed at the foot of the cross and the women who came to the tomb--who may have been the same women.  I'd be surprised if more conservative churches are focusing on those women; I'd be happy to be surprised.

One year, I thought about the gardener, and a poem came to me.  It tells the story of the first Easter morning from the view of a gardener.  It was inspired by the piece of the Easter story where Mary thinks that Jesus is the gardener, which made me think about the fact that there must have been a real gardener and made me wonder what he thought of all the commotion.

It first appeared in issue 3 of Eye to the Telescope.  The whole volume is devoted to persona poems and edited by Jeannine Hall Gailey.

The Gardener’s Tale


I liked to get to the garden
early, before the harsh
light of day revealed
all my mistakes, all the growth
I couldn’t contain.

I liked the pre-dawn
hours, when I knew
the flowers by their smells
as I rustled
their stems.

That morning I saw
him first. He asked
for bread, and I had a bit
to share. I offered
him olives and some cheese
from my son Simon’s goat.

We talked of ways to attract
butterflies to the garden:
the need for nectar
and leaves for the babies.
I showed him a tree
that had been ailing,
and he suggested a different nourishment.

I thanked him for his wisdom
and moved to the border
of the garden. I didn’t make
the connections until I heard
the shrieks of the women
and Peter nearly knocked me down.