Today’s poem is part of a special launch schedule during National Poetry Month from April 1—30, 2024. I’ll be posting a new poem daily for 30 days, which will be sent out to all subscribers as a summary on April 9, 16, 24, and 30 and otherwise can be viewed for free in the archives here. Thank you for being here!
“BUTTERFLY I”
Silk-blue water is a fallacy. The eye sees a beating kaleidoscopic of rushing greens, clears, yellows, and purples. The mouth calls it blue, paints it a shade of Crayola convenience. The Nalgene with day-old water, the running faucet my kitten swats the same way he does a spider. The trick to truth is to separate mouth from what feeds me. A butterfly flits by, I jerk my head. Instinct is to catch it, though I never do. I might just be satisfied watching. My mouth says, desperate, “It’s flying away”. If 66% of me is water and 100%, stardust, how did I assemble like this? My composition no correlation to my colour, just how long the skin of my ancestors burned. Why do you call me too soft, have you seen my blue?
P.S.
I’m writing an ongoing live collection of poems inspired by butterflies. This is the very first I wrote and it marked a bit of a departure from poems I had written up to this point, though I’m not really sure I can articulate what the difference is. It came out of a poetry workshop I did and a reading of Mary Oliver.