Hungry for the life of brief
animals, the life
once of a spotted white
moth, I kept finding them
corpses. Their bodies crushed
just so I misconstrued the meaning
of beauty, wings spread over dirt.
This was a prior life. I was young.
I ran errands, envied short
life cycles & indulged in comparative metamorphosis.
Once, of the ceramic blue
virgin mother built
into the parapet of a nearby parish,
I asked to be morphed quick
by winds lifting my skirt.
In September, the days got perfect
and they got ordinary again. The last sun
pushed fingers through wet trees after rain, through
the country of nests in dark branches.
Abandoned, at the foot of a tree, I found a nest.
The site of a new hatching. I imagined entering this
afterlife, learning rapture:
I knew already the string theories governing the haze
that would settle at dusk over our city by the battlements
where the wars had been fought.
War boats settled in siege. I understood history.
Yet, when I crossed a field returning,
I avoided the scene. All of it.
The dead moths de-winged & unmorphed. The newborn
birds coming alive in their nests and mortal.