Butterfly Requiem

 

 

Awake! We’re holding a butterfly wake!

 

For those millions upon millions

of monarchs

who perished, suddenly

in a winter storm, mid-January

in the year of our Lord, 2002.

 

Frozen as they hung

from great tree boughs,

resting from the miracle

of their mass migration

back to Mexico,

 

Festoons of fragile creatures

turned to ice,

fell to earth,

to lie in heaps upon the ground.

 

Awake! We’re holding a butterfly wake!

 

They say the thinning of the canopy,

destroyed, degraded, primal forest

nay have caused

this winged holocaust,

the downfall

of this host

of tiny beings.

 

And I awake!

​

Testing my wings,

trembling toward flight,

undone by the news,

reborn by  the light

of 200 million candles

blowing in the wind.

 

The answer is blowing in the wind.