Spring break. Kids are on the loose in the mind and everywhere.
Down by the creek, they club the ice with thick branches,
pelt its surface with stones, crying “die, die, die.”
Geese honk overhead in couples, or ragged threesomes,
forming loose patterns in the sky.
The wind is bracing, making cheeks apple red.
Crucifixion is in the air, winter on a cross,
and the children with their clubs, boots, and stones
spit at and taunt the dying god, stabbing at the old
wineskin hide in want of something better.
The oldest child has broken off a slab of ice as huge
as a continent and it floats on the cold gummy abyss
freed from the fetters of the land that claimed it.
Now ice returns to the form it once was, as the
god who took on flesh returns to his — spiritus,
the world now forever altered by his having been in it;
— altered now as the landscape is when we partake
of its transformation as he partook in ours.
