Easter Saturday
To recognise Easter Saturday in a way that encompasses everyone we are going to share a poem The Easter Flower by Claude Mckay.1
The Easter Flower
Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;
Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;
And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.
Claude Mckay
The Easter Lily is the traditional flower of Easter and is highly regarded as a joyful symbol of elegance, beauty, spirituality, hope, and life. In Christendom the lily has come to symbolize the resurrection of Jesus because of its delicacy of form and its snow white colour.
Exquisite Easter lilies grace the altars and surround the cross at Easter, to commemorate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
These beautiful trumpet shaped white flowers were brought to the United States in 1875 from Japan by an American tourist and named after the florist who made it popular. The flower retells the resurrection story with its life cycle. These snow white flowers symbolize new life and hope.2
Footnote:
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The Easter Flower: A Poem by Claude McKay
Festus Claudius McKay (1889-1948), better known as Claude McKay, was a Jamaican-American writer and an important poet in the Harlem Renaissance which also included Langston Hughes. McKay was an atheist (‘a pagan’, as he himself puts it), but one who could enjoy the scent of the Easter lily though he cannot believe in the Easter story. (credit: interestingliterature.com) -
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