The New York Sun continues its Holy Week series of poems read by living poets with Robert W. Crawford’s “After a Lenten Snow.” Director of Poetry at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire, Crawford is the author of The Empty Chair and Too Much Explanation Can Ruin a Man. A pair of pentameter quatrains with a delicate series of rhymes, “After a Lenten Snow” follows the long tradition of using the burgeoning sense of spring, in both nature and the self, to speak of the Easter resurrection.

After a Lenten Snow
by Robert W. Crawford

Above the forest floor a quiet descends
as trees adjust themselves to spring’s abeyance.
The gaining sun on which this all depends
seems brighter now in light of their abidance.

I feel in them my own anticipation
of lengthening days, the sap’s acceleration,
and soon, at Easter-time, the exaltation.
They wait with just a murmur of impatience.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.