Yesterday, a butterfly appeared
Fluttering at my windowpane, trapped on the inside,
Trying to get out, flummoxed, no matter how it tried,
By the invisible wall, the air of glass – and I feared
That all that’s right and all that’s wrong with the world
Was wrapped up in that moment, tightly furled:
A vision of light, as all the while, darkness neared.
For here was beauty, nature at its most sublime
Within my grasp, though I had no thought of grasping,
A sign of something fleeting, yet strangely everlasting
As if capturing the mystery and paradox of time
For a butterfly – that quintessential symbol of change –
Is now at odds with the world we carelessly rearrange
To suit our rhythm and reason, without rhyme
We, the standing ape, who in our great escape
From the trees and from all things wild, untamed,
Have made a home for ourselves and proudly claimed
That what we choose to overuse is not rape,
Only dominion – in truth, domination – over all
Until, in our arrogance, life itself begins to stall,
An age of extinction, an earth bent out of shape.
Do I read too deep? Was it just a random butterfly?
Of course, I opened the window and let it out,
A small victory for life and freedom; no doubt
An insignificant act, yet it felt good, at least to try,
Yet later that day, another butterfly was trapped
And I released it too, and a third and fourth appeared, flapped
And flailed, a tap-tap dance of panic on the glassy sky.
And so, it seems that my help was a delusion –
Quick fixes always are – for it did not touch the cause,
The root of the problem, the artificial laws
That keep us wanting more, the unnatural profusion
Of things that we don’t need, that do not nourish
Our spirits, or allow nature’s great web to flourish
And so, we continue, blissful in our confusion.
Still, this is the moment to change, as the end nears,
For endings can be beginnings, if we let go,
If we give up crawling and take to flying, we grow,
For we are not prisoners of our darkest fears,
We can act to reseed the earth and rewild the sea,
We can choose to free up space for all life to be,
For the next butterfly that appears
— Wayne Visser