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Gail Dendy

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Easter Egg

I painted eggs with Maori designs
for my daughter’s ‘foreign art’ school day:
maze-map cinnabar whorls, savage gypsum spikes
and careful drop-on points of shiny oxblood.

She cried she wanted a proper Easter egg,
lilac-washed to remind her of her favourite jacaranda
with its miniature sacs strung up as lanterns
and parting artfully across our gate at home,

or painted in the henna colours of floating candles
soul-flamed further and further to the point where
we took the night-flight over Asia
and watched the packaged cities shrink

to the size of iguana eggs blistered with light,
tracked as a kite between mountain and sea.
That’s where all life begins, in the wet
and the dark and someone’s desire for adding

one to one and the primordial spark
painted clumsily now in orange and yellow,
my daughter concentrating everything she knows
on holding the egg steady, not letting go.

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