there in our snug living 
room, a TV tray her craft 
center, my mom worked 
pysanky witchery, laughed 

at Carol Burnett, M*A*S*H*, 
All in the Family, as she 
gently pricked a hole 
with her needle at the small 

end of an egg, blowing 
never-to-be chicks 
through the other end 
into a bowl for scrambling, 

then focusing her gaze, 
heating the Kiska over 
candle flame, drawing 
beeswax lines, mixing 

crucifixion with pagan 
arcadia hex signs: 
eight-point stars, arrowed 
branches, Golgotha crosses 

on one side, cottontails 
munching verdure on the other. 
These waxed images would 
remain white, pure, as she

dipped shells into scarlet, 
vermillion, the purple of 
resurrection, settled her 
folk-art palimpsests of death 

and spring, paeans to sun gods, 
to the son as God, back in their 
cardboard nest. Despite Episcopal 
Sundays, her scant sense of history, 

cosmology, Mom may have 
felt what Egyptians, Greeks, 
Romans believed: our universe 
emerged from a mother’s egg. 

Let’s leave her here: 
30 years after Babi Yar, 
two decades before Ukraine 
would break free from Soviet’s 

Union, 50 years before Russia 
would bomb Kyiv, Kharkov, 
when pysanky will scatter streets 
with silt, shattered fine as bone. 

VA Smith

is an award-winning, retired teaching professor of English at Penn State and founder of Chancellor Writing Services. She’s dropped poetry into dozens of literary journals and anthologies, among them: Blue Lake Review, Southern Review, Gyroscope Review, and Oyster River Pages. Kelsay Books published her first poetry collection, Biking Through the Stone Age, in May 2022. Her second collection, American Daughters, also published by Kelsay, will appear in January 2023. She is at work on a third collection entitled Elsewhere, walking and biking, serving as a home chef/caterer, and loving on her friends, family, and dog.

Author’s website: www.vasmithpoetry.com