“The First Green Thing” an Easter poem with analysis by Dr. G.E. Mini

Today, March 21, 2026, is the first day of spring.

In 2010, I set out to write a different kind of Easter poem.  Robert Frost said, "Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom."  With that in mind, I set these thoughts in an imaginary walk in the woods, the kind I took as a boy when winter was gone and the warmer days of spring begged exploring. I was sometimes surprised by finding discarded human artifacts far off the beaten path: an old glass bottle, a bicycle seat, part of a broken teapot--odd things out of place that begged the question, "What in the world is this doing here?"  It was the memory of such walks and discoveries that prompted these lines .

"The First Green Thing"
Originally written and posted Good Friday,  April 2,  2010

The first green thing

I saw that spring

was not a hyssop sprig, 

not a trillium leaf along the trail,

nor the bourgeoning twig

of ivy on a crossed split rail.

No, before I’d seen a 

sign of things to come along the path,

I saw the green patina
of an artisan’s birdbath 
wrought in copper and bronze,
beautifully cast and crafted together 
and left to age as such responds
to air and time and weather.

It was meant for a garden, no doubt,
but was now cast off and left out
where wooded rains o'erflowed beneath
to its streaked and verdant stand.
The basin was a laurel wreath 
held high in a triumphant hand--

the base a sinnewed arm trapped
in the earth and further bound by a briar
that rose from the soil, wrapped
around the outstretched limb and higher

as if to draw the eye 

to things above and intertwine

the bowl's reflection of the sky

and laurel wreath in its thorny vine.

This overgrown and tarnished glory

seemed the preface to a story

told without a word

and forever fixed in time.
For when my curious fingers stirred
the water, I felt the stagnant slime 
hid just below the rippling blue.
And wafting from a putrid maché

of blackened leaves and acorns split in two 
came the septic stench of sewage and decay,
this the incense offered by the brazen hand

that could not feel the thorns at all

or see that they were rooted near the stand

in the cold and rotting remnants of the fall.

© Copyright 2010, TK, Patterns of Ink

Press arrow on screen to hear the poem read.

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If I were a sculptor, I’d like to make a birdbath like the one I depict in this poem. It would begin with a strong arm cast in bronze that rises from the ground holding a laurel wreath as if it were being placed on the head of the person looking in the water’s reflection in the basin of the birdbath.

Use of thorns: If natural thorns did not grow to ensnare my work, I would craft a vine of thorns to overtake the piece as happens in the poem so that, rather than man's praise around the onlooker's reflected head, he would see something more like a crown of thorns. 

Since ancient times, long before the time of Christ, the laurel wreath was the traditional prize for athletic victors. It was also worn by people in power like Caesar and members of the Roman Senate. Using a natural plant to make a crown was still a well-known practice in the time of Christ, which is why I think planting the crown of thorns on our Savior’s head was much more than a brutal act; it was meant to be a mockery. (As depicted in the 14th Century woodcarving below.) Little did the brutes know that the thorns, being a result and symbol of Eden's curse, only added to the full meaning of the cross. Romans 5:11-15 underscores this by connecting the sin of one man, Adam, with the reconciliation found in Christ who knew no sin yet took upon Himself the curse. "Cursed is He who hangs upon a tree." 

Just as the laurel wreath suggested honor, the crown of thorns was meant to be as shameful in meaning as it was painful to the brow, thus the poem’s imagery depicts thorns overtaking the wreath. 

Man's image of himself is one of strength, deserving the world's praise and applause (as depicted in the poem's sinewy arm raised high in victory even when bound by earth). In truth, however, fallen man is worthy--not of. praise--but of the thorns Christ wore on his behalf. 

All around we see both beauty and brokenness. We are blessed to see God's creation but cursed to know it is not as it once was. In the still water of this imaginary birdbath, for instance, we briefly see the sky, but just an inch below its reflection is the stench of rotting leaves and seeds left over from the fall. This image is very real to me.

In our backyard, we have a birdbath and other small fountains, and often in the spring when I go to clean out all the junk that fell in them before winter, there is a smell much like the smell of sewage that comes from the decay in the shallow water. By then, whatever leaves gathered there are not colorful like the ones in the picture below but blackened and matted together. Those are maple leaves, but we also have huge oaks in our yard, and the squirrels break the acorns and drop them below to mix in with all the other rotting things.

This stench is a contrast to the Old Testament practice of the incense offering. Isaiah 64:6 reminds us that whatever we "offer" to God is akin to filthy rags and fallen leaves: “We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind.”

“The cold and rotting remnants of the fall,” however, is not referring to the season of autumn but rather the fall of man. As beautiful as the reflection of the sky is, as wondrous as the hope of things to come may be, there is that decay of death just below the surface; there are those thorns strangling out the glory that was meant to be. 

There lies the beauty of spring that comes with Easter. The hyssop sprigs eventually show; the trillium begin to grow, and all the beauty that was Eden surrounds us in signs of life along the path. The first green things appeared in a perfect place, Eden, and likewise the green thing I saw in the poem, though of man’s making, "was meant for a garden, no doubt, but now cast off and left out." True, it was green, but the patina that comes from the oxidation of copper and bronze is a muted hue compared to the first green things of creation. And what were some of those green things mentioned?

The hyssop is native to eastern Mediterranean lands but was purposely brought to the western continents where it now flourishes. Along with the laurel, its meaning and many uses have been known since ancient times. Psalm 51:7 says, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”

Hyssop is known for its cleansing power and ritual use. It is also aromatic—in the mint family. The Gospel of John says that it was on a long woody stem of hyssop that the soldier offered wine vinegar to Christ at his crucifixion when he said “I thirst.” I do not now why that detail is mentioned. It may have been additional mockery by those who had just pronounced him "King of the Jews," but regardless of the motive, the use of hyssop made a vivid link between the first Passover and the ultimate sacrificial moment in history.
.

The trillium grows across North America, it was popularly voted the state wild flower of Michigan (but Lansing overruled). It is known for its mathematical design of displaying three leaves, three sepals, and three petals, all of which have been used in Christian circles as a picture of the mystery of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—united in  purpose though distinct in personality. It is in the lily family (tri=three lily), a perennial that bursts from the ground and shows leaf each year around Easter (but typically blooms in late April and May). Sometimes called a "wake-robin," the trillium flower was used by Native Americans as an antiseptic.

Ivy is a non-deciduous evergreen plant. We typically think of Christmas trees and conifers as evergreens, but holly and ivy and many other plants remain green year-round; they do not lose their leaves in the fall and thereby show the continuity of life in spite of all that changes around them. Ivy survives the harsh winter and resumes its spreading, clinging coverage on stationary things in the spring and summer. We have some split rail fence covered in ivy in our yard, but I included it to evoke the image of hewn wood as is also true of the cross. 

Thus in the opening stanza, the brief mention of these green things—the hyssop, trillium, and ivy—(yet unseen along the path) foreshadow the significance of "the first green thing" I did see: the patina of the copper birdbath with its stench of the rotting leaves. The story may be "forever fixed in time," but it is corrected when time as we know it is no more. Ending as it does, the poem gives hope that, for those who believe, the green things foreshadowed in the beginning—cleansing hyssop, the covering ivy, and the symbolic trillium—will triumph over the remnants of THE FALL

*******

Note added in 2026 to this post from 2010.  

I have an understandable caution regarding A.I. and the creative arts and do not use A.I. in writing poems or posts here at Patterns of Ink (POI).

Having said that, I recently stumbled upon "Gemini" which is what Google calls there A.I. program (similar to ChatGPT). I was curious how A.I. would analyze my "...metaphors and meaning and enless patterns of ink..." (as statted in this blog's header). I was pleasantly surprised—flabbergasted actually—that a poem that took hours even days to write could be so thoughtfully dissected in thirty seconds. 

Whenever I post an A.I. analysis at POI, I will playfully frame it as if provided by by Dr. G.E. Mini (Google’s Gemini A.I.) I must admit, this professor is very observant and surprisingly open to the spiritual elements often hidden in my writings.

Analysis of Tom Kapanka’s “The First Green Thing” by Dr. G.E. Mini, Professor of Little-known Literature, Ayai University

Tom Kapanka’s “The First Green Thing” is a masterclass in the "spiritual bait-and-switch." On the surface, it reads like a contemplative nature walk; underneath, it is a visceral meditation on the theology of Good Friday and the hope of Easter. By masking a heavy theological discourse within the discovery of a discarded garden ornament, Kapanka forces the reader to confront the "septic stench" of the human condition before offering the "hyssop" of redemption.

1. The Irony of the "Green Thing"

The poem’s title and opening stanza play with the reader’s expectations of spring. In a traditional nature poem, the "first green thing" would be a sign of life—a bud or a sprout. However, Kapanka’s narrator bypasses the biological (hyssop, trillium, ivy) for the chemical: the green patina of an oxidation process.

• The Patina vs. Nature: The green of the birdbath is a "muted hue," a result of copper reacting to "air and time and weather." It is a symbol of man-made glory that is literally corroding.

• The "Not Yet": By listing the hyssop and trillium as things he hadn't seen yet, Kapanka sets a tone of anticipation. The world is still in its "Good Friday" state—cold, damp, and waiting for a resurrection that hasn't arrived.

2. The Sculpture of Human Pride

The birdbath itself is a complex allegory of the "Fall of Man." Kapanka uses the physical attributes of the bronze to map out a spiritual landscape:

• The Sinewed Arm: Represents human strength and the desire for self-exaltation. It is "held high," yet it is "trapped in the earth." This creates a powerful image of man’s dual nature: reaching for glory while being tethered to a fallen world.

• The Laurel Wreath: Historically a symbol of athletic or political victory (Caesar), here it serves as the basin. Kapanka’s notes reveal the irony: the viewer looks into the water to see themselves crowned with "man’s praise," only to have that image subverted by the encroaching briars.

• The Briars/Thorns: These are not mere garden weeds; they are the "result and symbol of Eden’s curse." They wrap around the arm and the wreath, transforming the "crown of victory" into a "crown of thorns."

3. The Sensory Reality of Sin

The poem takes a dark, almost Gothic turn in the third stanza. The "curious fingers" of the narrator stir the water, shifting the poem from a visual analysis to a sensory experience of decay.

• The Stagnant Slime: Underneath the "rippling blue" (which reflects the sky/heaven) lies the "putrid maché" of death.

• The Septic Stench: Kapanka uses the smell of rotting acorns and leaves to mirror Isaiah’s description of "filthy rags." This "incense" offered by the bronze hand is a mockery of holy offerings. It reminds the reader that beneath the surface of our "righteous deeds" and "beautifully cast" exteriors, there is the "septic" reality of sin.

• The Fall: The "cold and rotting remnants of the fall" is a clever double entendre. It refers to the literal autumn debris and the theological Fall of Adam.

4. Foreshadowing and Resolution

The poem concludes by circling back to the plants mentioned in the beginning. These are not just botanical details; they are the "antidote" to the birdbath’s decay:

While the birdbath is "forever fixed in time" and "cast off," the natural elements represent a story that is still moving toward a conclusion. The patina is a dead green, but the hyssop is a living one.

Final Thought

Kapanka suggests that we are all like that birdbath: beautifully crafted by an Artisan, yet tarnished, trapped by thorns, and filled with the "stagnant slime" of our own nature. The "First Green Thing" isn't the sign of our own improvement, but the recognition of our need for the "cleansing hyssop" that only the Easter story provides.

*******

The following is a comparative analysis between this poem and a

the "Fall of Man” as depicted in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Comparing Tom Kapanka’s modern, tactile "The First Green Thing" with John Milton’s epic 17th-century masterpiece Paradise Lost reveals a shared obsession with the moment perfection becomes "septic." While Kapanka looks at a birdbath and Milton looks at the cosmos, both find the same "stagnant slime" at the heart of the human story.

1. The Corruption of the Garden

In both works, the garden is the stage where beauty and brokenness collide.

• Milton’s Eden: In Paradise Lost, Eden is a place of "enormous bliss." However, the moment Eve eats the fruit, Milton describes Nature itself reacting: "Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe."

• Kapanka’s Garden: Kapanka’s narrator finds a birdbath "meant for a garden... but now cast off." This mirrors the expulsion from Eden. The "septic stench" in the birdbath is the modern, localized version of Milton's universal "wound." Both authors suggest that once the "Fall" occurs, nature is no longer purely aesthetic—it is stained.

2. The Symbolism of Thorns: Victory vs. Curse

A central theme in both works is the subversion of natural beauty into a symbol of punishment.

Kapanka’s "sinewed arm" wrapped in briars is a physical manifestation of Milton's "Adam," who is now bound to a ground that no longer works for him, but against him.

3. The "Internal" Fall: Pride and Reflection

Both writers use the concept of a "reflection" to show how man views himself after losing perfection.

• The Mirror of the Water: In Kapanka’s poem, the birdbath is designed so the onlooker sees a "laurel wreath" on their reflected head. It is a trap of pride. But the narrator stirs the water and finds "stagnant slime."

• The Mirror of the Soul: In Milton, Adam and Eve’s first realization after the Fall is one of "nakedness" and shame. They no longer see the image of God in themselves, but rather their own "impurity."

• The "Sinewed Arm": Kapanka’s bronze arm represents the "brazen" pride of man—the same pride that led Milton’s Satan to rebel and Adam to disobey. Both authors emphasize that human strength is an illusion if it is "bound by a briar" to the earth.

4. The Hope of "The Second Adam"

The ultimate connection between the two is the foreshadowing of restoration.

Milton ends Paradise Lost with a "Promised Seed" who will eventually restore the "blissful Seat." Kapanka mirrors this by ending his poem with the hyssop and trillium. While the birdbath is "forever fixed in time" (representing the law and the curse), the living plants represent the "Spring that comes with Easter."

The Insight: Kapanka takes Milton’s grand, celestial theology and shrinks it down to the size of a backyard birdbath. He proves that the "septic stench of sewage and decay" is not just an ancient story—it’s something you can find in your own yard every spring.

This artisan's birdbath does not exist. The image was created
by Gemini after reading "The First Green Thing" in 2026.

Here is another Easter Poem form 2007:  "All Else" 

Ahead of Time

There is an outcome from my recent triple bypass surgery that I didn't know ahead of time. 

To fully understand that common phrase "ahead of time," I must first take you back in time, back to August 25, 1958.

On that date, my grandfather K (my dad’s dad) died at age fifty-nine. He awoke in the night with a tightness in his chest, fumbled his way to the bathroom, and fell with a heavy thud to the plush rug beside the tub. Heart attack. Gone before the first responders arrived. 

I was only two-years-old at the time, but in the years to follow, whenever we visited Grandma K's house on Griswald Street in Port Huron. my brothers and I shared a fear of going to that bathroom alone. Silly, I know, but the thought of our grandpa dying there never left us. I drive by that house sometimes, some sixty years later, and I know that if I went inside and looked down that hallway, the same eerie feeling would come over me. 

Secondly, I must share another backward glance to April 1, 1995, the date my own father suffered a similar heart attack. He and my mother had gone out for dinner. They had just shared what would be their last dance. Then walking back to their table, he suddenly fell limply to the floor. CPR from a stranger in the room, and a twenty-minute ambulance ride with my mother close behind. My sister met her there. Hurrying into the ER, they saw the A.E.D. paddles applied for the final time. "Clear!" Nothing. Gone. 

My dad was in excellent physical condition, an avid cyclist. He thought nothing of peddling his touring bike along the river from New Baltimore to Algonac to St.Clair to Port Huron and back (a distance of 100 miles) with a quick dip (swim) under the Blue Water Bridge in between. Yet, at age sixty-six, he seemed genetically destined to his father's fate, outliving him by only seven years. To my family it seemed Dad died "ahead of his time," but we also know that isn't true.

I was thirty-nine when we made that trip from Iowa to Michigan for my dad's funeral, and for many years thereafter it seemed I secretly lived in the shadow of grief. It was not a constant state of mourning but rather the sense that we are not physical beings awaiting a spiritual life after death--but rather we are spiritual beings navigating a passing physical life on earth. This gift is short-lived, "a vapor,” as scripture says. We share our allotted time with loved ones and millions of others ordained to live in broader and broader circles around us. It's all summed up in that dash between the two dates on the stones that mark our graves.

In the months and years that followed, I was not depressed--not in a clinical sense. In fact, I and my family experienced many wonderful things during the thirty-one years since 1995, but in that first decade or so, out of the blue, I sometimes missed my dad so much that I would sit alone someplace and sob. I thought of him whenever I tied the laces of the black shoes I wore at his funeral. I wore his tie when I interviewed for the "Head of School" position I enjoyed for twenty-four years (retiring in 2024). Once I was driving home from school alone and thought of something I wanted to talk to Dad about. I had to pull off to the side of the road until my eyes could see clearly again. If I thought this sort of thing were unique to me, I'm not sure I would share it.

Living with the acceptance of this quiet grief in the context of my faith and duties as a husband, father, brother, and grandfather changed my personality. My sometimes somber outlook changed the tone of my interactions and writing. It tinted the lens through which I saw ordinary things. You may notice this tone in a post I called "The Ache of Joy." Or in poems like  "Only the Roots Remain," in "Nothing Like the Heart,  in "Tender to the Ground," in “Something Short of Sorrow, and in many other poems and "chapters" I"ve shared here at Patterns of Ink. Literary melancholy is not unique to me. The most sensitive work of many writers--from Emily Dickinson to Abraham Lincoln to C.S. Lewis and countless others--was prompted by the pain of losing a loved one.

So what happened with my triple bypass surgery that I did not know ahead of time? 

Well, a few years ago, I did the math and realized that each month I lived was a month longer than my father’s time on earth. Who thinks that way? It’s positive and negative at the same time. Along with that private calculation, I secretly embraced the likelihood that I would someday pass in the same way, and I dreaded putting my loved ones through the same heartache my father knew in 1958 and that I knew in 1995. The diagnosis and timing of my surgery confirmed that, medically speaking, those thoughts almost came true.

What changed with my November hospital stay is that I no longer carry the secret sense that I am doomed by family history. I no longer sit at family gatherings quietly envisioning all of them there in the future, in the same familiar settings... without me. (As hinted at in "Seeing Through,") 

This is not to say that bypass surgery comes with guarantees. There are a million ways to die in west Michigan (sounds like a movie title). That final BREATH still lies ahead for me as it does for all of us. The hymns of my childhood were written a hundred years ago when thoughts of death were inseparable from images of heaven. Scores and scores of hymns foreshadowed "When we draw our "fleating breath" to "cross Jordan" and go "beyond the sunset" to that “ sweet by and by.” We seldom sing the old hymns anymore, but I still know the words by heart and take comfort in the belief that to be "absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." For now, however I feel like God has granted me more time…more hope… for whatever His plans include. 

I now share a "heart zipper" with the bravest little boy I know, and it makes me smile.

Ahead of time, I did not know that there would be a sense of community among the 15 strangers in my cardio-rehab sessions for three months. And yet, I will miss them when I am done next week. I'll miss the encouragement of smiles and head-nods we share across a busy room of exercise machines. 

Ahead of time, as I ate Thanksgiving dinner in the hospital, awaiting my surgery the next day, we were all praying for a good outcome—but I did not anticipate a new outlook afterwards. I thank God that both my heart and my mindset have been restored. I see every day as a gift and the thought of tomorrow as a blessing.

“Time does not pass—it gathers; it is not spent but shared.” [from  "The Ache of Joy."]

Tom Kapanka