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Writer's pictureChris Nash

"Build that Wall" ~ the Monarch butterfly


In the migrating-mass of our weeping

We wheel through the blue

Along the tracks of the sun, sweeping,

Our little lives frittering away

In flecks of self ~ broken and whole,

The universe spun through our dying,

In a sway of red embered ecstasies.


Out of a chanting kaleidoscope

Of our colours, our pities descend

For all the moneying monotonies

Of your days, what are your hopes

Of entering in our world of wings?


Where high as angelic hosts

We dance the joy of together -

Each beat of each slender wing

Summons the stirring of Spring

from over your bickering walls

from your dull lying civilisations,

from austere walls where you kneel

And stare into an invisibility of souls

With minds, black as death’s mystery,


Plaster monuments to wars, to nations:

Hear, why won’t you hear, you ghosts,

Our wing-beats of insect prayer

For you to bury your selves, bury yourselves,

Before our beauties burn to cinder.


Butterfly poets of the borderless mind

We sing the songs

in the hearts of the people


Butterfly poets of the borderless mind

We sing the songs

Along the winds of the world


Butterfly poets of the borderless mind

We are stained glass windows

Of the heaven singing skies,

The ever cathedralling skies.


Notes:

Climate change threatens to disrupt the monarch butterfly’s annual migration pattern by affecting weather conditions in both wintering grounds and summer breeding grounds. Colder, wetter winters could be lethal to these creatures and hotter, drier summers could shift suitable habitats north. The number is measured by the amount of forest they occupy, and in 2013 the number of butterfly acres decreased from approximately seven to three. Abnormal patterns of drought and rainfall in the U.S. and Canada breeding sites may have caused adult butterfly deaths and less plant food for caterpillars. Fewer butterflies up north mean fewer then migrate south to Mexico for the winter.

Source - World Wildlife Fund for Nature


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