According to my plan,
I did indeed bike to Mama’s home
on Easter Sunday / yesterday.
We chatted from a distance,
she at her front door,
me on St. Augustine lawn.
Our Easter Sunday family gathering
in the year of COVID,
without a table or a meal.
From my daypack, I brought out
an empty shell with cut paper filling:
a hand-painted cascarón—confetti egg—
and gently placed it
one lone one
on her porch and stepped away,
I won’t mind if you leave it there
or maybe just smash it with your shoe.
Our hearts have been broken before
when prison, money, or unsettled rifts
have kept us from our holiday home.
Today, by phone,
Mama tells me that she
forgot about it overnight
but now
the one lone cascarón
is inside her house.
“She’s cute,” Mama said.
“It’s a she to me.”
From the collection Together In A Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Alice Quinn
(Which just so happens to have a bicycle on the cover.)
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