This week’s poem, “Easter Morning,” relates a story of surprisingly resurrective humor for two sisters and a niece outside a hospital. I love this poem’s clear, vivid storytelling, and how these three women find a moment of hilarious, nearly gravity-defying transcendence.

Judy Darke Delogu grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her fiction has appeared in Potato Eyes, The Sun, and Portland Magazine. Her poem “On Viewing the Execution of Lady Jane Grey,” published in Ekphrasis, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poem “Salt Lake City, 1957,” appeared recently in Dialogue. She lives in Portland.

Easter Morning

Who knows why
that guy singled us out.
Me and my sister—
two middle-aged women
pushing her adult
daughter in a wheelchair
around Boston Children’s—
when on Easter morning
he rose from a bed
of blushing tulips
and pulling down
his running shorts,
exposed himself.

Weak with laughter
from this sudden reveal,
my sister and I collapsed
into one another’s arms.

Born with spina bifida,
my niece, encased in plaster,
newly frozen ankles,
screws in her knees,
and a reconstructed bladder,
shouted, He is risen,
and rocked inside her body cast.

– By Judy Darke Delogu

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Easter Morning,” copyright ©2024 by Judy Darke Delogu, appears by permission of the author.