I really don’t care about butterflies
after Kim Addonizio (with a line from Nabokov)
I don’t really care about butterflies, especially when they land in poems
except when a Red Admiral gets lost in the great grey fields
of the curtains and, because you really don’t see them so much
anymore, and portents of doom should be treated kindly, I will catch
it in my lanterned hands to set free through the bedroom window.
And I really don’t care for butterflies unless I remember Nabokov,
whose sentences could be long and complicated but perfect, like:
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning)
when I was three, once said literature and butterflies were man’s
most perfect passions. Then I think about the blues and a rabble of
Icaricia acmon flurry in the parlour dome where I’ve staged
my heart on show for safe keeping.
But I really don’t care for butterflies because hope has made me tired.
There’s a kind of cruelty in teaching our children that everything will
one day be beautiful. It’s like killing the male chicks at the battery,
or taking the brown pencils out of the set. I’d rather love the caterpillars
who stay soft and ugly and, if I must care for butterflies, let it be the ones
who land in the open eyes of crocodiles and make garlands of sorrow.
Claire Berlyn is an Australian living on Dartmoor in the UK. She has many occupations, poetry being her favourite. She aspires to have a list of ‘published’ and ‘appeared in’ places for her poems to use in bios like this.