Easter Eggs

As I hold one steady for my three-year-old while he

slaps it with garish red, yellow, black, changing my hand
and his to bright apparitions around that perfectly
ordinary whiteness, I wonder what strange need
began this, drove us to add these brittle
ornaments to spring's own: the pastel flowers
of bulbs already open, the sky's deepening blue,
the enfolding green incipient everywhere. But he
sees differently, chooses these fall colors
to wonder at--then, suddenly, wonders most of all
at my hand and how he's transformed it, laughing
as he paints it again and again, until the egg
takes color from my mere touch, and I understand
these eggs are not for spring, not newness: they belong
to that oldest world we've carried always within us, ablaze
with magnificent birds that could only hatch from such brilliance,
ourselves savagely radiant in our own colors.

--Mark Anderson