The yellow poui blooms under grey skies, surviving Sahara dust and dry season rain, as Easter arrives after the hush of Eid and the colour of Phagwa. And what a season it is to survive.
Gaza is rubble, more than 70,000 dead since October 2023, likely higher. Ukraine is trench and attrition, tens of thousands of civilians killed, far more soldiers uncounted. Iran and Israel trade strikes; Iraq absorbs the spillover. Iraq, Syria and Yemen have buried hundreds of thousands, the toll across these wars edging past a million. Oil routes tighten, prices rise, the United States arms its allies and secures its interests.
Food and fuel cost more in vulnerable nations, Yemen, Sudan, Egypt, Pakistan, Cuba, where most of what people eat and use for fuel is imported.
It’s our world, and we could let our hearts sink into dry earth or remember that, like the poui, we have been bare, spent, and still, briefly, we flower.
This Easter bookshelf, I have gathered quotes from women writers who tell us to look up at the hills at the light when we want to burrow our heads under the covers.
“We get to love imperfectly”
From Nadia Bolz-Weber, an American Lutheran pastor and writer
“Never once did Jesus scan the room for the best example of holy living and send that person out to tell others about him. He always sent stumblers and sinners. I find that comforting.
“And this is it. This is the life we get here on earth. We get to give away what we receive. We get to believe in each other. We get to forgive and be forgiven. We get to love imperfectly. And we never know what effect it will have for years to come. And all of it…all of it is completely worth it.”
(Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People)
“Learn to dance with the limp”
From Anne Lamott, an American novelist and nonfiction writer
“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.
“My pastor, Veronica, one Sunday told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, sweating a little under its feathery arms. A warhorse walks up to the bird and asks, ‘What on earth are you doing?”’The sparrow replies, ‘I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help.’ The horse laughs a big, loud, sneering horse laugh, and says, ‘Do you really think you’re going to hold back the sky, with those scrawny little legs?’ And the sparrow says, ‘One does what one can…’
“We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unravelling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if, on the inside, our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.
“In the aftermath of loss, we do what we’ve always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can…”
(Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, 2013)
“It will not be perfect. But it will be ours”
From Sahar Delijani, an Iranian American novelist and essayist
“There was a bloodbath in Iran. In January 2026, to survive yet another revolt against its 47 years of dictatorial rule, the Islamic Republic unleashed one of the largest, most ruthless massacres of citizens’ uprising in recent history.
“The regime turned machine guns and sniper rifles on demonstrators. It used machetes and knives, handguns and assault rifles. It killed until morgues overflowed, sidewalks were lined with body bags, hospital floors ran red.
“What did we do to deserve this?” A mother weeps on her 17-year-old son’s grave, killed by security forces. “May you be cursed for taking my child.”
“But as Israeli [and American] missiles now rain down on a nation of 90 million, the curse returns for the children. That is how this global order responds to every demand for life: It extinguishes it. The violence is cyclical, maddening, without end. When the Iranian regime’s guns fall silent, American bombs begin. When the Iranian security forces withdraw, Israeli airstrikes follow. I am a child of this wreckage, of unending grief, of loss that shapes each morning I wake. (Le Monde March 1 2026)
“I know that no matter what, the people of Iran have and will come out with their heads held high… It will not be perfect. But it will be ours. It will emerge not from our personal trauma but from our collective memory, not from our private despair but from our combined hope.”
(Of Loss, Hope, and Memory in Revolt”, Kweli Journal, 30 November 2022)
“No place for self-pity. No need for silence, no room for fear”
From Toni Morrison, an American novelist and essayist
“I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls... he asks, ‘How are you?’ and instead of ‘Oh, fine... and you?’, I blurt out the truth: ‘Not well. Not only am I depressed, but I also can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralysed, unable to write anything... I’ve never felt this way before…’ I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: ‘No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work... not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job.’ I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed... this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilisations heal.”
(No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear, The Nation, 2015)
The yellow poui careens across the windshield, burns in the hills, holds its colour against the grey, survives dry-season showers, reminding us that pain, like joy, has its season and that the bereft skeletal tree, flowering gold, however briefly, will return, endlessly.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian columnist, and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
