A Gaudy Butterfly Laid Me
On a milkweed leaf she laid me
with no great hope of my
success,
for I was just one of a
hundred eggs
she deposited,
flitting, pausing, flitting,
pausing,
my mother's abdomen arching
each time and putting us down;
we pinheads were merely
something
that made her feel good
or the result of an act that
did;
or not even that;
I don't know and will never know.
I ate my full engorgement of clean furrows
in the white-juiced leaves
until I grew
to a fat temptation for
predators
that eat the likes of me,
but the numbers had it
that I was one of the few who
survived,
never got picked off in the
hard
mandibles of life.
No,
my disappointment was
different;
I spun my waxy cocoon
according to pattern
and then, alas, instead of the
transformation,
the metanoia,
I had my beauty taken from me
and my capsule gradually
turned black,
and as I lay dying inside,
rotting into a fetid inkiness,
a monarch's striving nature
nonetheless living still,
my little strength merged to
poke a pinhole in the bottom
of my enbindment,
and by dint
of waning force I dripped this
message onto the leaf below,
and that is how you come
to read a distillation of all
I was ever to become,
a quotation, nothing more, but by a higher power than I:
What we have to be
Is what we are - Thomas Merton
[David Dix
7/06]
Dee and I were there, Gethsemene, KY Trappistary
^,^
Unusual Christmas bird
perched outside of Studebaker Garage
W. Main St. Waukesha in Dec. 2014
^,^
Earthly Present-Meager Christmas, 1943
but dressed up for the picture for Lt. Col. LV Dix
^,^
*Due to busy project scheduling
and a PC problem in addition
the Raccoon is abbreviated today.
We will be back next week
with a fuller menu.
Thoughts, inspirations flow...
Stew Tolbert, ATTN:
