The lilies open their faces in the kitchen,
pink and cream in the rainy morning.
The bells began early,
not far into the dawn.
The parishioners huddle in the church doors.

Persephone steps from the shadows
into the awkward light,
her feet break the soil
into crocus, forsythia, snapdragon,
sheaves of grass almost black
with green.

The earth flinches under the girl’s touch
and slips in the back door,
feeling almost ashamed of its resurrection.

Christopher Bernard is the author of the novels A Spy in the Ruins and Voyage to a Forgotten Planet, the short-story collections Dangerous Stories for Boys and In the American Night, and The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. He is co-editor of Caveat Lector and a regular contributor to Synchronized Chaos.