7 of 30 Elegy for My Sisters' Easter Ducklings

You motherless things,
you had no home to hold you.
Your cardboard box open to the sky
behind the garage, among the rusting sheet metal.
The willow wept.

The rabbits lived until the snow came,
starved in their crates unfed by we lazy children
but you would not survive the day.

My sisters did not think to pray.
their white dresses and bonnets for show
a masque of piety, my father refusing the host
and bloody Christ staring at the ceiling
through the endless morning

We ate what sweetness we could find.
My dog, loose from the flagpole,
prowling the grass
for another small and unwatched thing